The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

SECTION 2. THE CALVINIST REVOLT

When Charles V, weary of the heaviest scepter ever wielded by any European monarch from Charlemagne to Napoleon, sought rest for his soul in a monk's cell, he left his great possessions divided between his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip. To the former went Austria and the Empire, to the latter the Burgundian provinces and Spain with its vast dependencies in the New World.

[Sidenote: Spain and the Netherlands]

The result of this was to make the Netherlands practically a satellite of Spain. Hitherto, partly because their interests had largely coincided with those of the Empire, partly because by balancing Germany against Spain they could manage to get their own rights, they had found prosperity and had acquired a good deal of national power. Indeed, with their wealth, their central position, and growing strength as province after province was annexed, and their consciousness that their ruler was a native of Flanders, their pride had been rather gratified than hurt by the knowledge that he possessed far larger dominions. [Sidenote: Abdication of Charles] But when Charles, weeping copiously and demanding his subjects' pardon, descended from the throne supported by the young Prince of Orange, [Sidenote: October 25, 1555] and when his son Philip II had replied to his father in Spanish, even those present had an uneasy feeling that the situation had changed for the worse, and that the Netherlands were being handed over from a Burgundian to a Spanish ruler. From {247} this time forth the interests and sentiments of the two countries became more and more sharply divergent, and, as the smaller was sacrificed to the larger, a conflict became inevitable. The revolt that followed within ten years after Philip had permanently abandoned the Netherlands to make his home in Spain [Sidenote: 1559] was first and foremost a nationalist revolt. Contrasted with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a national self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces.

[Sidenote: Religious issue]

But though the catastrophe was apparently inevitable from political grounds, it was greatly complicated and intensified by the religious issue. Philip was determined, as he himself said, either to bring the Netherlands back to the fold of Rome or "so to waste their land that neither the natives could live there nor should any thereafter desire the place for habitation." And yet the means he took were even for his purpose the worst possible, a continual vacillation between timid indulgence and savage cruelty. Though he insisted that his ministers should take no smallest step without his sanction, he could never make up his mind what to do, waited too long to make a decision and then, with fatal fatuity, made the wrong one.

[Sidenote: Calvinism]

At the same time the people were coming under the spell of a new and to the government more dangerous form of Protestantism. Whereas the Lutherans had stood for passive obedience and the Anabaptists for revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent middle classes and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure martyrdom but also—what the others had lacked—the will and the power to resist tyranny by force. Calvin's polity, as worked out in Geneva, was a subordination of the state to the church. His reforms were thorough and consciously social and political. Calvinism in all lands aroused {248} republican passions and excited rebellion against the powers that be. This feature was the more prominent in the Netherlands [Sidenote: 1545] in that its first missionaries were French exiles who irrigated the receptive soil of the Low Countries with doctrines subversive of church and state alike. The intercourse with England, partly through the emigration from that land under Mary's reign, partly through the coming and going of Flemings and Walloons, also opened doors to Protestant doctrine.

At first the missionaries came secretly, preaching to a few specially invited to some private house or inn. People attended these meetings disguised and after dark. First mentioned in the edict of 1550, nine years later the Calvinists drew up a Confessio Belgica, as a sign and an aid to union. Calvin's French writings could be read in the southern provinces in the original. Though as early as 1560 some nobles had been converted, the new religion undoubtedly made its strongest appeal, as a contemporary put it, "to those who had grown rich by trade and were therefore ready for revolution." It was among the merchants of the great cities that it took strongest root and from the middle class spread to the laborers; influenced not only by the example of their masters, but sometimes also by the policy of Protestant employers to give work only to co-religionists. In a short time it had won a very considerable success, though perhaps not the actual majority of the population. Many of the poor, hitherto Anabaptists, thronged to it in hopes of social betterment. Many adventurers with no motive but to stir the waters in which they might fish joined the new party. But on the whole, as its appeal was primarily moral and religious, its constituency was the more substantial, progressive, and intelligent part of the community.

The greatest weakness of the Protestants was their {249} division. Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist continued to compete for the leadership and hated each other cordially. The Calvinists themselves were divided into two parties, the "Rekkelijken" or "Compromisers" and the "Preciesen" or "Stalwarts." Moreover there were various other shades of opinion, not amounting quite to new churches. The pure Erasmians, under Cassander, advocated tolerance. More pronounced was the movement of Dirck Volckertszoon Coornheert [Sidenote: Coornheert, 1522-90] a merchant of Amsterdam who, in addition to advising his followers to dissimulate their views rather than to court martyrdom, rejected the Calvinist dogma of predestination and tried to lay the emphasis in religion on the spirit of Jesus rather than on either dogma or ritual.

Though the undertow was slowly but surely carrying the Low Countries adrift from Spain, for the moment their new monarch, then at the age of twenty-eight, seemed to have the winds and waves of politics all in his favor. He was at peace with France; he had nothing to fear from Germany; his marriage with Mary of England made that country, always the best trader with the Netherlands, an ally. His first steps were to relieve Mary of Hungary of her regency and to give it to Emanuel Philibert, to issue a new edict against heresy and to give permission to the Jesuits to enter the Low Countries. [Sidenote: 1556]

The chief difficulties were financial. The increase in the yield of the taxes in the reign of Charles had been from 1,500,000 guilders[1] to 7,000,000 guilders. In addition to this, immense loans had exhausted the credit of the government. The royal domain was mortgaged. As the floating debt of the Provinces rose rapidly the {250} government was in need of a grant to keep up the army. The only way to meet the situation was to call the States General. [Sidenote: March, 1556] When they met, they complained that they were taxed more heavily than Spain and demanded the removal of the Spanish troops, a force already so unpopular that William of Orange refused to take command of it. In presenting their several grievances one province only, Holland, mentioned the religious question to demand that the powers of the inquisitors be curtailed. To obtain funds Philip was obliged to promise, against his will, to withdraw the soldiers. This was only done, under pressure, on January 10, 1561.

[Sidenote: 1559]

Philip had left the Netherlands professing his intention of returning, but hoping and resolving in his heart never to do so. His departure made easier the unavoidable breach, but the struggle had already begun. Wishing to leave a regent of royal blood Philip appointed Margaret of Parma, a natural daughter of Charles V. Born in 1522, she had been married at the age of fourteen to Alexander de' Medici, a nephew of Clement VII; becoming a widow in the following year she was in 1538 married to Ottavio Farnese, a nephew of Paul III, at that time only fourteen years old. Given as her dower the cities of Parma and Piacenza, she had become thoroughly Italian in feeling.

[Sidenote: Anthony Perrenot Cardinal Granvelle, 1517-86]

To guide her Philip left, besides the Council of State, a special "consulta" or "kitchen cabinet" of three members, the chief of whom was Granvelle. The real fatherland of this native of the Free County of Burgundy was the court. As a passionate servant of the crown and a clever and knowing diplomat, he was in constant correspondence with Philip, recommending measures over the head of Margaret. His acts made her intensely unpopular and her attempts to coax and cozen public opinion only aroused suspicion.

{251}

[Sidenote: Egmont, 1522-68]

Three members in the Council of State, Granvelle and two others, were partisans of the crown; three other members may be said to represent the people. One of them was Lamoral Count of Egmont, the most brilliant and popular of the high nobility. Though a favorite of Charles V on account of his proved ability as a soldier, his frankness and generosity, he was neither a sober nor a weighty statesman. The popular proverb, "Egmont for action and Orange for counsel," well characterized the difference between the two leading members of the Council of State. William, prince of Orange, lacking the brilliant qualities of Egmont, far surpassed him in acumen and in strength of character. From his father, William Count of Nassau-Dillenburg, [Sidenote: William the Silent, 1533-84] he inherited important estates in Germany near the Netherlands, and by the death of a cousin he became, at the age of eleven, Prince of Orange—a small, independent territory in southern France—and Lord of Breda and Gertruidenberg in Holland. With an income of 150,000 guilders per annum he was by far the richest man in the Netherlands, Egmont coming next with an income of 62,000. William was well educated. Though he spoke seven languages and was an eloquent orator, he was called "the Silent" because of the rare discretion that never revealed a secret nor spoke an imprudent word. In religion he was indifferent, being first a Catholic, then a Lutheran, then a Calvinist, and always a man of the world. His broad tolerance found its best, or only, support in the Erasmian tendencies of Coornheert. His second wife, Anne of Saxony, having proved unfaithful to him, he married, while she was yet alive, Charlotte of Bourbon. This act, like the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, was approved by Protestant divines. Behind them Egmont and Orange had the hearty support of the patriotic and well educated native nobility. {252} The rising generation of the aristocracy saw only the bad side of the reign of Charles; they had not shared in his earlier victories but had witnessed his failure to conquer either France or Protestantism.

[Sidenote: New bishoprics]

In order to deal more effectively with the religious situation Granvelle wished to bring the ecclesiastical territorial divisions into harmony with the political. Hitherto the Netherlands had been partly under the Archbishop of Cologne, partly under the Archbishop of Rheims. But as these were both foreigners Granvelle applied for and secured a bull creating fourteen new bishoprics and three archbishoprics, [Sidenote: March 12, 1559] Cambrai, Utrecht, and Malines, of which the last held the primacy. His object was doubtless in large part to facilitate the extirpation of heresy, but it was also significant as one more instance of the nationalization of the church, a tendency so strong that neither Catholic nor Protestant countries escaped from it. In this case all the appointments were to be made by the king with consent of the pope. The people resented the autocratic features of a plan they might otherwise have approved; a cry was raised throughout the provinces that their freedom was infringed upon, and that the plan furnished a new instrument to the hated inquisition.

[Sidenote: February, 1561]

Granvelle, more than ever detested when he received the cardinal's hat, was dubbed "the red devil," "the archrascal," "the red dragon," "the Spanish swine," "the pope's dung." In July Egmont and Orange sent their resignations from the Council of State to Philip, saying that they could no longer share the responsibility for Granvelle's policy, especially as everything was done behind their backs. Philip, however, was slow to take alarm. For the moment his attention was taken up with the growth of the Huguenot party in France and his efforts centered on helping the French Catholics against them. But the Netherlands were {253} importunate. In voicing the wishes of the people the province of Brabant, with the capital, Brussels, the metropolitan see, Malines, and the university, Louvain, took as decided a lead as the Parlement of Paris did in France. The estates of Brabant demanded that Orange be made their governor. The nobles began to remember that they were legally a part of the Empire. The marriage of Orange, on August 26, 1561, with the Lutheran Anne of Saxony, was but one sign of the rapprochment. Though the prince continued to profess Catholicism, he entertained many Lutherans and emphasized as far as possible his position as vassal of the Empire. Philip, indeed, believed that the whole trouble came from the wounded vanity of a few nobles.

But Granvelle saw deeper. [Sidenote: 1561] When the Estates of Brabant stopped the payment of the principal tax or "Bede," [2] and when the people of Brussels took as a party uniform a costume derived from the carnival, a black cloak covered with red fool's heads, the cardinal, whose red hat was caricatured thereby, stated that nothing less than a republic was aimed at. This was true, though in the anticipation of the nobles, at least, the republic should have a decidedly aristocratic character. But Granvelle had no policy to propose but repression. In order to prevent condemned heretics from preaching and singing on the scaffold a gag was put into their mouths. How futile a measure! The Calvinists no longer disguised, but armed—a new and significant fact—thronged to their conventicles. Emigration continued on a large scale. By 1556 it was estimated that thirty thousand Protestants from the Low Countries were settled in or near London. Elizabeth encouraged them to come, assigning them {254} Norwich as a place of refuge. [Sidenote: 1563] She also began to tax imports from the Netherlands, a blow to which Philip replied by forbidding all English imports.

[Sidenote: Revolt]

Hitherto the resistance to the government had been mostly passive and constitutional. But from 1565 may be dated the beginning of the revolt that did not cease until it had freed the northern provinces forever from Spanish tyranny. The rise of the Dutch Republic is one of the most inspiring pages in history. Superficially it has many points of resemblance with the American War of Independence. In both there was the absentee king, the national hero, the local jealousies of the several provinces, the economic grievances, the rising national feeling and even the religious issue, though this had become very small in America. But the difference was in the ferocity of the tyranny and the intensity of the struggle. The two pictures are like the same landscape as it might be painted by Millet and by Turner: the one is decent and familiar, the other lurid and ghastly. With true Anglo-Saxon moderation the American war was fought like a game or an election, with humanity and attention to rules; but in Holland and Belgium was enacted the most terrible frightfulness in the world; over the whole land, mingled with the reek of candles carried in procession and of incense burnt to celebrate a massacre, brooded the sultry miasma of human blood and tears. On the one side flashed the savage sword of Alva and the pitiless flame of the inquisitor Tapper; on the other were arrayed, behind their dykes and walls, men resolved to win that freedom which alone can give scope and nobility to life.

[Sidenote: The Intellectuals]

And in the melée those suffered most who would fain have been bystanders, the humanists. Persecuted by both sides, the intellectuals, who had once deserted the Reform now turned again to it as the lesser of the two {255} evils. They would have been glad to make terms with any church that would have left them in liberty, but they found the whips of Calvin lighter than the scorpions of Philip. Even those who, like Van Helmont, wished to defend the church and to reconcile the Tridentine decrees with philosophy, found that their labors brought them under suspicion and that what the church demanded was not harmony of thought but abnegation of it.

The first act of the revolt may be said to be a secret compact, known as the Compromise, [Sidenote: The Compromise, 1565] originally entered into by twenty nobles at Brussels and soon joined by three hundred other nobles elsewhere. The document signed by them denounced the Edicts as surpassing the greatest recorded barbarity of tyrants and as threatening the complete ruin of the country. To resist them the signers promised each other mutual support. In this as in subsequent developments the Calvinist minority took the lead, but was supported by strong Catholic forces. Among the latter was the Prince of Orange, not yet a Protestant. His conversion really made little difference in his program; both before and after it he wanted tolerance or reconciliation on Cassander's plan of compromise. He would have greatly liked to have seen the Peace of Augsburg, now the public law of the Empire, extended to the Low Countries, but this was made difficult even to advocate because the Peace of Augsburg provided liberty only for the Lutheran confession, whereas the majority of Protestants in the Netherlands were now Calvinists. For the same reason little help could be expected from the German princes, for the mutual animosity that was the curse of the Protestant churches prevented their making common cause against the same enemy.

As the Huguenots—for so they began to be called in Brabant as well as in France—were as yet too few {256} to rebel, the only course open was to appeal to the government once more. A petition to make the Edicts milder was presented to Margaret in 1566. One of her advisers bade her not to be afraid of "those beggars." Originating in the scorn of enemies, like so many party names, the epithet "Beggars" (Gueux) presently became the designation and a proud one, of the nobles who had signed the Compromise and later of all the rebels.

Encouraged by the regent's apparent lack of power to coerce them, the Calvinist preachers became daily bolder. Once again their religion showed its remarkable powers of organization. Lacking nothing in funds, derived from a constituency of wealthy merchants, the preachers of the Reformation were soon able to forge a machinery of propaganda and party action that stood them in good stead against the greater numbers of their enemies. Especially in critical times, discipline, unity, and enthusiasm make headway against the deadly hatred of enemies and the deadlier apathy and timidity of the mass of mankind. It is true that the methods of the preachers often aroused opposition.

[Sidenote: Iconoclasm]

The zeal of the Calvinists, inflamed by oppression and encouraged by the weakness of the government, burst into an iconoclastic riot, [Sidenote: August 11, 1566] first among the unemployed at Armentières, but spreading rapidly to Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and then to the northern provinces, Holland and Zeeland. The English agent at Brussels wrote: "Coming into Oure Lady Church, yt looked like hell wher were above 1000 torches brannyng and syche a noise as yf heven and erth had gone together with fallyng of images and fallyng down of costly works." Books and manuscripts as well as pictures were destroyed. The cry "Long live the Beggars" resounded from one end of the land to the {257} other. But withal there was no pillage and no robbery. The gold in the churches was left untouched. Margaret feared a jacquerie but, lacking troops, had to look on with folded hands at least for the moment. By chance there arrived just at this time an answer from Philip to the earlier petition of the Beggars. The king promised to abolish the Spanish inquisition and to soften the edicts. Freedom of conscience was tacitly granted, but the government made an exception, as soon as it dared, of those who had committed sacrilege in the recent riots. These men were outlawed.

[Sidenote: Civil war]

No longer fearing a religious war the Calvinists started it themselves. Louis of Nassau, a brother of Prince William, hired German mercenaries and invaded Flanders, where he won some slight successes. In Amsterdam the great Beggar Brederode entered into negotiations with Huguenots and English friends. The first battle between the Beggars and the government troops, [Sidenote: March 13, 1567] near Antwerp, ended in a rout for the former.

Philip now ordered ten thousand Spanish veterans, led by Alva, to march from Italy to the Netherlands. Making their way through the Free County of Burgundy and Lorraine they entered Brussels on August 9, 1567. [Sidenote: Alva 1508-83] Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alva, had won experience and reputation as a soldier in the German wars. Though self-controlled and courtly in manner, his passionate patriotism and bigotry made him a fit instrument to execute Philip's orders to make the Netherlands Spanish and Catholic. He began with no uncertain hand, building forts at Antwerp and quartering his troops at Brussels where their foreign manners and Roman piety gave offence to the citizens. On September 9 he arrested the counts of Egmont and Horn, next to Orange the chief leaders of the patriotic party. Setting up a tribunal, called the Council of {258} Troubles, to deal with cases of rebellion and heresy, he inaugurated a reign of terror. He himself spent seven hours a day in this court trying cases and signing death-warrants. Not only heretics were punished but also agitators and those who had advocated tolerance. Sincere Catholics, indeed, noted that the crime of heresy was generally the mere pretext for dealing with patriots and all those obnoxious to the government. [Sidenote: Executions] For the first time we have definite statistics of the numbers executed. For instance, on January 4, 1568, 48 persons were sentenced to death, on February 20, 37; on February 21, 71; on March 20, 55; and so on for day after day, week in and week out. On March 3 at the same hour throughout the whole land 1500 men were executed. The total number put to death during the six years of Alva's administration has been variously estimated at from 6,000 to 18,000. The lower number is probably nearer the truth, though not high enough. Emigration on a hitherto unknown scale within the next thirty or forty years carried 400,000 persons from the Netherlands. Thousands of others fled to the woods and became freebooters. The people as a whole were prostrated with terror. The prosperity of the land was ruined by the wholesale confiscations of goods. Alva boasted that by such means he had added to the revenues of his territories 500,000 ducats per annum.

William of Orange retired to his estates at Dillenburg not to yield to the tyrant but to find a point d'appui from which to fight. Wishing to avoid anything that might cause division among the people he kept the religious issue in the background and complained only of foreign tyranny. He tried to enlist the sympathies of the Emperor Maximilian II and to collect money and men. William's friend Villiers invaded the Burgundian State near Maastricht and Louis of Nassau marched with troops into Friesland. {259} [Sidenote: April, 1568] By this time Alva had increased his army by 10,000 German cavalry and both the rebel leaders were severely defeated.

This triumph was followed by an act of power and defiance on Alva's part sometimes compared to the execution of Louis XVI by the French Republicans. Hitherto the sufferers from his reign of blood had not in any case been men of the highest rank. The first execution of nobles took place at Brussels on June 1, that of the captured Villiers followed on June 2, and that of Egmont and Horn on June 5.

Orange himself now took the field with 25,000 troops, a motley aggregate of French, Flemish, and Walloon Huguenots and of German mercenaries. But he had no genius for war to oppose to the veterans of Alva. Continually harassed by the Spaniards he was kept in fear for his communications, dared not risk a general engagement and was humiliated by seeing his retreat, in November, turned into a rout.

[Sidenote: July 16, 1570]

Finding that severity did not pacify the provinces, Alva issued a proclamation that on the face of it was a general amnesty with pardon for all who submitted. But he excepted by name several hundred emigrants, all the Protestant clergy, all who had helped them, all iconoclasts, all who had signed petitions for religious liberty, and all who had rebelled. As these exceptions included the greater portion of those who stood in need of pardon the measure proved illusory as a means of reconciliation. Coupled with it were other measures, including the prohibition to subjects to attend foreign universities, intended to put a check on free trade in ideas.

[Sidenote: Taxation]

Alva's difficulties and the miseries of the unhappy land entrusted to his tender mercies were increased by want of money. Notwithstanding the privilege of {260} granting their own taxes the States General were summoned [Sidenote: March 21, 1569] and forced to accept new imposts of one per cent. on all property real and personal, ten per cent. on the sale of all movable goods and five per cent. on the sale of real estate. These were Spanish taxes, exorbitant in any case but absolutely ruinous to a commercial people. A terrible financial panic followed. Houses at Antwerp that had rented for 300 gulden could now be had for 50 gulden. Imports fell off to such an extent that at this port they yielded but 14,000 gulden per annum instead of 80,000 as formerly. The harbor was filled with empty boats; the market drugged with goods of all sorts that no one would buy.

[Sidenote: Beggars of the Sea]

The cause of the patriots looked hopeless. Orange, discredited by defeat, had retired to Germany. At one time, to avoid the clamors of his troops for pay, he was obliged to flee by night from Strassburg. But in this dark hour help came from the sea. Louis of Nassau, not primarily a statesman like his brother but a passionate crusader for Protestantism, had been at La Rochelle and had there seen the excellent work done by privateers. In emulation of his French brethren he granted letters of marque to the sailors of Holland and Zeeland. Recruits thronged to the ships, Huguenots, men from Liège, and the laborers of the Walloon provinces thrown out of work by the commercial crisis. These men promptly won striking successes in preying on Spanish commerce. Their many and rich prizes were taken to England or to Emden and sold. Often they landed on the coasts and attacked small Catholic forces, or murdered priests. On the night of March 31-April 1, 1572, these Beggars of the Sea seized the small town of Brielle on a large island at the mouth of the Meuse not far from the Hague. This success was immediately followed by the insurrection of Rotterdam and Flushing. The war was conducted with combined {261} heroism and frightfulness. Receiving no quarter the Beggars gave none, and to avenge themselves on the unspeakable wrongs committed by Alva they themselves at times massacred the innocent. But their success spread like wildfire. The coast towns "fell away like beads from a rosary when one is gone." Fortifications in all of them were strengthened and, where necessary, dykes were opened. Reinforcements also came from England.

[Sidenote: Revolution]

By this time the revolt had become a veritable revolution. It found its battle hymn in the Wilhelmuslied and its Washington in William of Orange. As all the towns of Holland save Amsterdam were in his hands, in June the provincial Estates met—albeit illegally, for there was no one authorized to convene them—assumed sovereign power and made William their Stat-holder. They voted large taxes and forced loans from rich citizens, and raised money from the sale of prizes taken at sea. All defect in prescriptive and legal power was made up by the popularity of the prince, deeply loved by all classes, not only on account of his affability to all, even the humblest, but still more because of confidence in his ability. Never did his versatility, patience and skill in management shine more brightly. Among the troops raised by the patriots he kept strict discipline, thus making by contrast more lurid the savage pillage by the Spaniards. He kept far from fanatics and swashbucklers of whom there were plenty attracted to the revolt. His master idea was to keep the Netherlands together and to free them from the foreigner. Complete independence of Spain was not at first planned, but it soon became inevitable.

For a moment there was a prospect of help from Coligny's policy of prosecuting a war with Spain, but these hopes were destroyed by the defeat of the French Huguenots near Mons [Sidenote: July 17, 1572] and by the massacre of Saint {262} Bartholomew. [Sidenote: August 24, 1572] Freed from menace in this quarter and encouraged by his brilliant victory, Alva turned north with an army now increased to 40,000 veterans. First he took Malines and delivered it to his soldiers for "the most dreadful and inhuman sack of the day" as a contemporary wrote. The army then marched to Guelders and stormed Zutphen under express orders from their general "not to leave one man alive or one building unburnt." "With the help of God," as Alva piously reported, the same punishment was meted out to Naarden. Then he marched to the still royalist Amsterdam from which base he proceeded to invest Haarlem. The siege was a long and hard one for the Spaniards, harassed by the winter weather and by epidemics. Alva wrote Philip that it was "the bloodiest war known for long years" and begged for reinforcements. [Sidenote: July 12, 1573] At last famine overcame the brave defenders of the city and it capitulated. Finding that his cruelty had only nerved the people to the most desperate resistance, and wishing to give an example of clemency to a city that would surrender rather than await storming, Alva contented himself with putting to death to the last man 2300 French, English, and Walloon soldiers of the garrison, and five or six citizens. He also demanded a ransom of 100,000 dollars[3] in lieu of plunder. Not content with this meager largess the Spanish troops mutinied, and only the promise of further cities to sack quieted them. The fortunes of the patriots were a little raised by the defeat of the Spanish fleet in the Zuiderzee by the Beggars on October 12, 1573.

[Sidenote: Requesens]

For some time Philip had begun to suspect that Alva's methods were not the proper ones to win back the affectionate loyalty of his people. Though he hesitated long he finally removed him late in 1573 and {263} appointed in his stead Don Louis Requesens. Had Philip come himself he might have been able to do something, for the majority professed personal loyalty to him, and in that age, as Shakespeare reminds us, divinity still hedged a king. But not having the decision to act in person Philip picked out a favorite, known from his constant attendance on his master as "the king's hour-glass," in whom he saw the slavishly obedient tool that he thought he wanted. The only difference between the new governor and the old was that Requesens lacked Alva's ability; he had all the other's narrowly Spanish views, his bigotry and absolutism.

Once arrived in the provinces committed to his charge, he had no choice but to continue the war. But on January 27, 1574, Orange conquered Middelburg and from that date the Spanish flag ceased to float over any portion of the soil of Holland or Zeeland. In open battle at Mook, however, [Sidenote: April 14, 1574] the Spanish veterans again achieved success, defeating the patriots under Louis of Nassau, who lost his life. The beginning of the year saw the investment of Leyden in great force. The heroism of the defence has become proverbial. When, in September, the dykes were cut to admit the sea, so that the vessels of the Beggars were able to sail to the relief of the city, the siege was raised. It was the first important military victory for the patriots and marks the turning-point of the revolt. Henceforth the Netherlands could not be wholly subdued.

Requesens summoned the States General and offered a pardon to all who would submit. But the people saw in this only a sign of weakness. A flood of pamphlets calling to arms replied to the advances of the government. Among the pamphleteers the ablest was Philip van Marnix, [Sidenote: Marnix, 1538-98] a Calvinist who turned his powers of satire against Spain and the Catholic {264} church. William of Orange, now a Protestant, living at Delft, inspired the whole movement. Requesens, believing that if he were out of the way the revolt would collapse, like Alva offered public rewards for his assassination. That there was really no common ground was proved at a conference between the two foes, broken off without result. In the campaign of 1575 the Spanish army again achieved great things, taking Oudewater, Schoonhoven and other places. But the rebels would not give up.

[Sidenote: March 5, 1576]

The situation was changed by the death of Requesens. Before his successor could be appointed events moved rapidly. After taking Zierikzee on June 29, the Spanish army turned to Aalst, quartered the soldiers on the inhabitants, and forced the loyal city to pay the full costs of their maintenance. If even the Catholics were alienated by this, the Protestants went so far as to preach that any Spaniard might be murdered without sin. In the concerted action against Spain the Estates of Brabant now took the leading part; meeting at Brussels they intimidated the Council of State and raised an army of 3000 men. By this time Holland and Zeeland were to all intents and purposes an independent state. The Calvinists, strong among the native population, were recruited by a vast influx of immigrants from other Provinces until theirs became the dominant religion. Holland and Zeeland pursued a separate military and financial policy. Alone among the provinces they were prosperous, for they had command of the rich sea-borne commerce.

The growth of republican theory kept pace with the progress of the revolt. Orange was surrounded by men holding the free principles of Duplessis-Mornay and corresponding with him. Dutchmen now openly voiced their belief that princes were made for the sake of their subjects and not subjects for the sake {265} of princes. Even though they denied the equal rights of the common people they asserted the sovereignty of the representative assembly. The Council of State, having assumed the authority of the viceroy during the interim, was deluged with letters petitioning them to shake off the Spanish yoke entirely. But, as the Council still remained loyal to Philip, on September 4 its members were arrested, a coup d'état planned in the interests of Orange and doubtless with his knowledge. It was, of course, tantamount to treason. The Estates General now seized sovereign powers. Still protesting their loyalty to the monarch's person and to the Catholic religion, they demanded virtual independence and the withdrawal of the Spanish troops. To enforce their demands they collected an army and took possession of several forts. But the Spanish veterans never once thought of giving way. Gathering at Antwerp where they were besieged by the soldiers of the States General, [Sidenote: November 4, 1576] they attacked and then scattered the bands sent against them and proceeded to sack Antwerp like a captured town. In one dreadful day 7000 of the patriots, in part soldiers, in part noncombatants, perished. The wealth of the city was looted. The army of occupation boasted as of a victory of this deed of blood, known to the Netherlanders as "the Spanish fury."

Naturally, such a blow only welded the provinces more firmly together and steeled their temper to an even harder resistance. Its immediate result was a treaty, known as the Pacification of Ghent, between the provinces represented in the States General on the one hand and Holland and Zeeland on the other, for the purposes of union and of driving out the foreigner. The religious question was left undecided, save that the northern provinces agreed to do nothing for the present against the Roman church. But, as {266} heretofore, the Calvinists, now inscribing "Pro fide et patria" on their banners, were the more active and patriotic party.

[Sidenote: Don John, 1547-78]

On May 1, 1577, the new Governor-General, Don John of Austria, entered Brussels. A natural son of Charles V, at the age of twenty-four he had made himself famous by the naval victory of Lepanto, and his name still more celebrated in popular legend on account of his innumerable amours. That he had some charm of manner must be assumed; that he had ability in certain directions cannot be denied; but his aristocratic hauteur, his contempt for a nation of merchants and his disgust at dealing with them, made him the worst possible person for the position of Governor. Philip's detailed instructions left nothing to the imagination: the gist of them was to assure the Catholic religion and obedience of his subjects "as far as possible," to speak French, and not to take his mistresses from the most influential families, nor to alienate them in any other way. After force had been tried and failed the effect of gentleness was to be essayed. Don John was to be a dove of peace and an angel of love.

But even if a far abler man had been sent to heal the troubles in the Netherlands, the breach was now past mending. In the States General, as in the nation at large, there were still two parties, one for Orange and one for Philip, but both were determined to get rid of the devilish incubus of the Spanish army. The division of the two parties was to some extent sectional, but still more that class division that seems inevitable between conservatives and liberals. The king still had for him the clergy, the majority of the nobles and higher bourgeoisie; with William were ranged the Calvinists, the middle and lower classes and most of the "intellectuals", lawyers, men of learning and those publicists known as the "monarchomachs." Many of {267} these were still Catholics who wished to distinguish sharply between the religious and the national issue. At the very moment of Don John's arrival the Estates passed a resolution to uphold the Catholic faith.

[Sidenote: February, 1577]

Even before he had entered his capital Don John issued the "Perpetual Edict" agreeing to withdraw the Spanish troops in return for a grant of 600,000 guilders for their pay. He promised to respect the privileges of the provinces and to free political prisoners, including the son of Orange. In April the troops really withdrew. The small effect of these measures of conciliation became apparent when the Estates General voted by a majority of one only to recognize Don John as their Statholder. [Sidenote: May 12] So little influence did he have that he felt more like a prisoner than a governor; he soon fled from his capital to the fortress of Namur whence he wrote urging his king to send back the troops at once and let him "bathe in the blood of the traitors."

William was as much pleased as John was enraged at the failure of the policy of reconciliation. While the majority of the states still hoped for peace William was determined on independence at all costs. In August he sent a demand to the representatives to do their duty by the people, for he did not doubt that they had the right to depose the tyrant. Never did his prospects look brighter. Help was offered by Elizabeth and the tide of republican feeling began to rise higher. In proportion as the laborers were drawn to the party of revolt did the doctrine of the monarchomachs become liberal. No longer satisfied with the democracy of corporations and castes of the Middle Ages, the people began to dream of the individualistic democracy of modern times.

The executive power, virtually abandoned by Don John, now became centered in a Committee of {268} Eighteen, nominally on fortifications, but in reality, like the French Committee of Public Safety, supreme in all matters. This body was first appointed by the citizens of Brussels, but the States General were helpless against it. It was supported by the armed force of the patriots and by the personal prestige of Orange. His power was growing, for, with the capitulation of the Spanish garrison at Utrecht he had been appointed Statholder of that province. When he entered Brussels on September 23, he was received with the wild acclamations of the populace. Opposition to him seemed impossible. And yet, even at this high-water mark of his power, his difficulties were considerable. Each province was jealous of its rights and, as in the American Revolution, each province wished to contribute as little as possible to the common fund. Moreover the religious question was still extremely delicate. Orange's permission to the Catholics to celebrate their rites on his estates alienated as many Protestant fanatics as it conciliated those of the old religion.

[Sidenote: Archduke Matthew]

The Netherlands were not yet strong enough to do without powerful foreign support, nor was public opinion yet ripe for the declaration of an independent republic. Feeling that a statholder of some sort was necessary, the States General petitioned Philip to remove Don John and to appoint a legitimate prince of the blood. This petition was perhaps intentionally impossible of fulfilment in a way agreeable to Philip, for he had no legitimate brother or son. But a prince of the House of Hapsburg offered himself in the person of the Archduke Matthew, a son of the Emperor Maximilian, recently deceased. [Sidenote: October 12, 1576] Though he had neither ability of his own nor support from his brother, the Emperor Rudolph II, and though but nineteen years old, he offered his services to the Netherlands and immediately went thither. With high statecraft William {269} drew Matthew into his policy, for he saw that the dangers to be feared were anarchy and disunion. In some cities, notably Ghent, where another Committee of Eighteen was appointed on the Brussels model, the lowest classes assumed a dictatorship analagous to that of the Bolsheviki in Russia. At the same time the Patriots' demand that Orange should be made Governor of Brabant was distasteful to the large loyalist element in the population. William at once saw the use that might be made of Matthew as a figure-head to rally those who still reverenced the house of Hapsburg and who saw in monarchy the only guarantee of order at home and consideration abroad. Promptly arresting the Duke of Aerschot, a powerful noble who tried to use Matthew's name to create a separate faction, Orange induced the States General first to decree Don John an enemy of the country [Sidenote: December 7, 1577] and then to offer the governorship of the Netherlands to the archduke, at the same time begging him, on account of his youth, to leave the administration in the hands of William. After Matthew's entry into Brussels [Sidenote: January 18, 1578] the States General swore allegiance to this puppet in the hands of their greatest statesman.

Almost immediately the war broke out again. Both sides had been busy raising troops. At Gembloux Don John with 20,000 men defeated about the same number of Patriot troops. [Sidenote: January 31] But this failed to clarify a situation that tended to become ever more complicated. Help from England and France came in tiny dribblets just sufficient to keep Philip's energies occupied in the cruel civil war. But the vacancy, so to speak, on the ducal throne of the Burgundian state, seemed to invite the candidacy of neighboring princes and a chance of seriously interesting France came when the ambition of Francis, Duke of Anjou, was stirred to become ruler of the Low Countries. William attempted also to make {270} use of him. In return for the promise to raise 12,000 troops, Anjou received from the States General the title of "Defender of the Freedom of the Netherlands against the tyranny of the Spaniards and their allies." The result was that the Catholic population was divided in its support between Matthew and Anjou, and that Orange retained the balance of influence.

[Sidenote: Protestant schism]

The insuperable difficulty in the way of success for the policy of this great man was still the religious one. Calvinism had been largely drawn off to Holland and Zeeland, and Catholicism remained the religion of the great majority of the population in the other provinces. At first sight the latter appeared far from being an intractable force. In contrast with the fiery zeal of the Calvinists on the one hand and of the Spaniards on the other, the faith of the Catholic Flemings and Walloons seemed lukewarm, an old custom rather than a living conviction. Most were shocked by the fanaticism of the Spaniards, who thus proved the worst enemies of their faith, and yet, within the Netherlands, they were very unwilling to see the old religion perish. When the lower classes at Ghent assumed the leadership they rather forced than converted that city to the Calvinist confession. Their acts were taken as a breach of the Pacification of Ghent and threatened the whole policy of Orange by creating fresh discord. To obviate this, William proposed to the States General a religious peace on the basis of the status quo with refusal to allow further proselyting. [Sidenote: July, 1578] But this measure, acceptable to the Catholics, was deeply resented by the Calvinists. It was said that one who changed his religion as often as his coat must prefer human to divine things and that he who would tolerate Romanists must himself be an atheist.

[Sidenote: Division of the Netherlands]

It was therefore, a primarily religious issue, and no difference of race, language or material interest, {271} that divided the Netherlands into two halves. For a time the common hatred of all the people for the foreigner welded them into a united whole; but no sooner was the pressure of the Spanish yoke even slightly relaxed than the mutual antipathy of Calvinist and Catholic showed itself. If we look closely into the causes why the North should become predominantly Protestant while the South gradually reverted to an entirely Catholic faith, we must see that the reasons were in part racial, in part geographical and in part social. Geographically and linguistically the Northern provinces looked for their culture to Germany, and the Southern provinces to France. Moreover the easy defensibility of Holland and Zeeland, behind their moats, made them the natural refuge of a hunted sect and, this tendency once having asserted itself, the polarization of the Netherlands naturally followed, Protestants being drawn and driven to their friends in the North and Catholics similarly finding it necessary or advisable to settle in the South. Moreover in the Southern provinces the two privileged classes, clergy and nobility, were relatively stronger than in the almost entirely bourgeois and commercial North. And the influence of both was thrown into the scale of the Roman church, the first promptly and as a matter of course, the second eventually as a reaction from the strongly democratic tendency of Calvinism. In some of the Southern cities there ensued at this time a desperate struggle between the Protestant democracy and the Catholic aristocracy. The few Protestants of gentle birth in the Walloon provinces felt ill at ease in company with their Dutch co-religionists and were called by them "Malcontents" because they looked askance at the political principles of the North.

[Sidenote: January 1579]

The separatist tendencies on both sides crystallized as some of the Southern provinces signed a league at {272} Arras on January 5 for the protection of the Catholic religion. On the 29th this was answered by the Union of Utrecht, signed by the representatives of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Guelders, Zutphen, and the city of Ghent, binding the said provinces to resist all foreign tyranny. Complete freedom of worship was granted, a matter of importance as the Catholic minority was, and has always remained, large. By this act a new state was born. Orange still continued to labor for union with the Southern provinces, but he failed. A bitter religious war broke out in the cities of the South. At Ghent the churches were plundered anew. [Sidenote: 1581] At Brussels and Antwerp the Protestant proletariat won a temporary ascendancy and Catholic worship was forbidden in both cities. A general emigration from them ensued. Under the stress of the religious war which was also a class war, the last vestiges of union perished. The States General ceased to have power to raise taxes or enforce decrees, and presently it was no more regarded.

Even William of Orange now abandoned his show of respect for the monarch and became wholly the champion of liberty and of the people. [Sidenote: 1580] The States General recognized Anjou as their prince, but at the same time drew up a very republican constitution. The representatives of the people were given not only the legislative but also the executive powers, including the direction of foreign affairs. The States of the Northern Provinces formally deposed Philip, [Sidenote: Deposition of Philip, 1581] who could do nothing in reply. A proclamation had already been issued offering 25,000 dollars and a patent of nobility to anyone who would assassinate Orange who was branded as "a traitor and rascal" and as "the enemy of the human race."

[Sidenote: October 1, 1578]

Don John, having died unlamented, was succeeded by Alexander Farnese, a son of the ex-regent Margaret {273} of Parma. [Sidenote: Farnese, 1545-92] Though an Italian in temperament he united a rare diplomatic pliability with energy as a soldier. Moreover, whereas his predecessors had despised the people they were sent to govern and had hated the task of dealing with them, he set his heart on making a success. By this time the eyes of all Europe were fixed on the struggle in the Low Countries and it seemed a worthy achievement to accomplish what so many famous soldiers and statesmen had failed in. It is doubtless due to the genius of Farnese that the Spanish yoke was again fixed on the neck of the southern of the two confederacies into which the Burgundian state had spontaneously separated. Welcomed by a large number of the signers of the Treaty of Arras, [Sidenote: 1579] he promptly raised an army of 31,000 men, mostly Germans, attacked and took Maastricht. A sickening pillage followed in which no less than 1700 women were slaughtered. Seeing his mistake, on capturing the next town, Tournai, he restrained his army and allowed even the garrison to march out with the honors of war. Not one citizen was executed, though an indemnity of 200,000 guilders was demanded. His clemency helped his cause more than his success in arms.

[Sidenote: Conquest of the South]

Slowly but surely his campaign of conquest progressed. It was a war of sieges only, without battles. Bruges was taken after a long investment, and was mildly treated. [Sidenote: 1584] Ghent surrendered and was also let off with an indemnity but without bloody punishment. After a hard siege Antwerp capitulated. [Sidenote: 1585] Practically the whole of the Southern confederacy had been reduced to obedience to the king of Spain. The Protestant religion was forbidden by law but in each case when a city was conquered the Protestants were given from two to four years either to become reconciled or to emigrate.

{274} But the land that was reconquered was not the land that had revolted. A ghastly ruin accompanied by a numbing blight on thought and energy settled on the once happy lands of Flanders and Brabant. The civil wars had so wasted the country that wolves prowled even at the gates of great cities. The coup de grace was given to the commerce of Antwerp by the barring of the Scheldt by Holland. Trade with the East and West Indies was forbidden by Spain until 1640.

[Sidenote: Freedom of the North]

But the North, after a desperate struggle and much suffering, vindicated its freedom. Anjou tried first to make himself their tyrant; [Sidenote: January 17, 1583] his soldiers at Antwerp attacked the citizens but were beaten off after frightful street fighting. The "French fury" as it was called, taught the Dutch once again to distrust foreign governors, though the death of Anjou relieved them of fear.

[Sidenote: June, 1584]

But a sterner foe was at hand. Having reduced what is now called Belgium, Farnese attacked the Reformation and the republicans in their last strongholds in Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The long war, of a high technical interest because of the peculiar military problems to be solved, was finally decided in favor of the Dutch. The result was due in part to the heroic courage of the people, in part to the highly defensible nature of their country, saved time and again by that great ally, the sea.

[Sidenote: July 10, 1584]

A cruel blow was the assassination of Orange whose last words were "God have pity on this poor people." His life had been devoted to them in no spirit of ambition or vulgar pride; his energy, his patience, his breadth had served the people well. And at his death they showed themselves worthy of him and of the cause. Around his body the Estates of Holland convened and resolved to bear themselves manfully {275} without abatement of zeal. Right nobly did they acquit themselves.

[Sidenote: 1586, Leicester]

The bad ending of a final attempt to get foreign help taught the Dutch Republic once and for all to rely only on itself. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's favorite, was inaugurated as Governor General. His assumption of independent power enraged his royal mistress, whereas the Dutch were alienated by the suspicion that he sacrificed their interests to those of England, and by his military failures. In less than two years he was forced to return home. [Sidenote: 1587]

[Sidenote: Oldenbarneveldt, 1547-1619]

Under the statesmanlike guidance of John van Oldenbarneveldt, since 1586 Pensionary of Holland, a Republic was set up founded on the supremacy of the Estates. Under his exact, prudent, and resolute leadership internal freedom and external power were alike developed. Though the war continued long after 1588 the defeat of the Armada in that year crippled Spain beyond hope of recovery and made the new nation practically safe.

[Sidenote: The Dutch Republic]

The North had suffered much in the war. The frequent inundation of the land destroyed crops. Amsterdam long held out against the rest of Holland in loyalty to the king, but she suffered so much by the blockade of the Beggars of the Sea and by the emigration of her merchants to nearby cities, that at last she gave in and cast her lot with her people. From that time she assumed the commercial hegemony once exercised by Antwerp. Recovering rapidly from the devastations of war, the Dutch Republic became, in the seventeenth century, the first sea-power and first money-power in the world. She gave a king to England and put a bridle in the mouth of France. She established colonies in America and in the East Indies. With her celebrated new university of Leyden, with {276} publicists like Grotius, theologians like Jansen, painters like Van Dyke and Rembrandt, philosophers like Spinoza, she took the lead in many of the fields of thought. Her material and spiritual power, her tolerance and freedom, became the envy of the world.

[1] The guilder, also called the "Dutch pound," at this time was worth 40 cents intrinsically. Money had many times the purchasing power that it has in 1920.

[2] The word, meaning "prayer," indicated, like the English "benevolence" and the French "don gratuit," that the tax had once been voluntarily granted.

[3] The dollar, or Thaler, is worth 75 cents, intrinsically.

{277}

CHAPTER VI

ENGLAND

SECTION 1. HENRY VIII AND THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 1509-47

[Sidenote: Henry VIII, 1509-47]

"The heavens laugh, the earth exults; all is full of milk and honey and nectar." With these words the accession of Henry VIII was announced to Erasmus by his pupil and the king's tutor, Lord Mountjoy. This lover of learning thought the new monarch would be not only Octavus but Octavius, fostering letters and cherishing the learned. There was a general feeling that a new era was beginning and a new day dawning after the long darkness of the Middle Age with its nightmares of Black Deaths and Peasants' Revolts and, worst of all, the civil war that had humbled England's power and racked her almost to pieces within.

It was commonly believed that the young prince was a paragon: handsome, athletic, learned, generous, wise, and merciful. That he was fond of sports, strong and in early life physically attractive, is well attested. The principal evidences of his learning are the fulsome testimony of Erasmus and his work against Luther. But it has been lately shown that Erasmus was capable of passing off, as the work of a powerful patron, compositions which he knew to be written by Latin secretaries; and the royal author of the Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which evinces but mediocre talent, received much unacknowledged assistance.

If judged by his foreign relations Henry's statesmanship was unsuccessful. His insincerity and perfidy often overreached themselves, and he was often {278} deceived. Moreover, he was inconstant, pursuing no worthy end whatever. England was by her insular location and by the nearly equal division of power on the Continent between France and the emperor, in a wonderfully safe and advantageous place. But, so far was Henry from using this gift of fortune, that he seems to have acted only on caprice.

[Sidenote: Domestic policy]

In domestic policy Henry achieved his greatest successes, in fact, very remarkable ones indeed. Doubtless here also he was favored by fortune, in that his own ends happened in the main to coincide with the deeper current of his people's purpose, for he was supported by just that wealthy and enterprising bourgeois class that was to call itself the people and to make public opinion for the next three centuries. In time this class would become sufficiently conscious of its own power to make Parliament supreme and to demand a reckoning even from the crown, but at first it needed the prestige of the royal name to conquer the two privileged classes, the clergy and the nobility. The merchants and the moneyed men only too willingly became the faithful followers of a chief who lavishly tossed to them the wealth of the church and the political privileges of the barons. And Henry had just one strong quality that enabled him to take full advantage of this position; he seemed to lead rather than to drive, and he never wantonly challenged Parliament. The atrocity of his acts was only equaled by their scrupulous legality.

On Henry's morals there should be less disagreement than on his mental gifts. Holbein's faithful portraits do not belie him. The broad-shouldered, heavy-jowled man, standing so firmly on his widely parted feet, has a certain strength of will, or rather of boundless egotism. Francis and Charles showed themselves persecuting, and were capable of having a {279} defaulting minister or a rebel put to death; but neither Charles nor Francis, nor any other king in modern times, has to answer for the lives of so many nobles and ministers, cardinals and queens, whose heads, as Thomas More put it, he kicked around like footballs.

[Sidenote: Empson and Dudley executed, April 25, 1509]

The reign began, as it ended, with political murder. The miserly Henry VII had made use of two tools, Empson and Dudley, who, by minute inquisition into technical offences and by nice adjustment of fines to the wealth of the offender, had made the law unpopular and the king rich. Four days after his succession, Henry VIII issued a proclamation asking all those who had sustained injury or loss of goods by these commissioners, to make supplication to the king. The floodgates of pent-up wrath were opened, and the two unhappy ministers swept away by an act of attainder.

[Sidenote: War with France and Scotland]

The pacific policy of the first years of the reign did not last long. The young king felt the need of martial glory, of emulating the fifth Henry, of making himself talked about and enrolling his name on the list of conquerors who, in return for plaguing mankind, have been deified by them. It is useless to look for any statesmanlike purpose in the war provoked with France and Scotland, but in the purpose for which he set out Henry was brilliantly successful: the French were so quickly routed near Guinegate [Sidenote: August 13, 1513] that the action has been known in history as the Battle of the Spurs. While the king was still absent in France and his queen regent in England, his lieutenants inflicted a decisive defeat on the Scots [Sidenote: September] and slew their king, James IV, at Flodden. England won nothing save military glory by these campaigns, for the invasion of France was at once abandoned and that of Scotland not even undertaken.

[Sidenote: Wolsey, c. 1475-1530]

The gratification of the national vanity redounded the profit not only of Henry but of his minister, {280} Thomas Wolsey. A poor man, like the other tools of the Tudor despot, he rose rapidly in church and state partly by solid gifts of statesmanship, partly by baser arts. By May, 1515, Erasmus described him as all-powerful with the king and as bearing the main burden of public affairs on his shoulders, and fifteen years later Luther spoke of him as "the demigod of England, or rather of Europe." His position at home he owed to his ability to curry favor with the king by shouldering the odium of unpopular acts. [Sidenote: May, 1521] When the Duke of Buckingham was executed for the crime of standing next in succession to the throne, Wolsey was blamed; many people thought, as it was put in a pun attributed to Charles V, that "it was a pity so noble a buck should have been slain by such a hound." Wolsey lost the support of the nobles by the pride that delighted to humble them, and of the commons by the avarice that accumulated a corrupt fortune. But, though the rich hated him for his law in regard to enclosures, and the poor for not having that law enforced, he recked little of aught, knowing himself secure under the royal shield.

To make his sovereign abroad as great as at home, he took advantage of the nice balance of power existing on the Continent. "Nothing pleases him more than to be called the arbiter of Christendom," wrote Giustiniani, and such, in fact, he very nearly was. His diplomatic gifts were displayed with immense show during the summer of 1520, when Henry met both Francis and Charles V, and promised each secretly to support him against his rival. The camp where the royalties of France and England met, near Guines, amid scenes of pageantry and chivalry so resplendent as to give it the name of The Field of Cloth of Gold, saw an alliance cemented by oath, only to be followed by a solemn engagement between Henry and Charles, {281} repugnant in every particular to that with France. When war actually broke out between the two, England preferred to throw her weight against France, thereby almost helping Charles to the throne of universal empire and raising up for herself an enemy to menace her safety in many a crisis to come. In the end, then, Wolsey's perfidious policy failed; and his personal ambition for the papacy was also frustrated.

But while "the congress of kings," as Erasmus called it, was disporting itself at Guines and Calais, the tide of a new movement was swiftly and steadily rising, no more obeying them than had the ocean obeyed Canute. More in England than in most countries the Reformation was an imported product. Its "dawn came up like thunder" from across the North Sea.

Luther's Theses on Indulgences were sent by Erasmus to his English friends Thomas More and John Colet little more than four months after their promulgation. [Sidenote: March 5, 1518] By February, 1519, Froben had exported to England a number of volumes of Luther's works. One of them fell into the hands of Henry VIII or his sister Mary, quondam Queen of France, as is shown by the royal arms stamped on it. Many others were sold by a bookseller at Oxford throughout 1520, in which year a government official in London wrote to his son in the country, [Sidenote: March 3, 1520] "there be heretics here which take Luther's opinions." The universities were both infected at the same time. At Cambridge, especially, a number of young men, many of them later prominent reformers, met at the White Horse Tavern regularly to discuss the new ideas. The tavern was nicknamed "Germany" [Sidenote: 1521] and the young enthusiasts "Germans" in consequence. But surprisingly numerous as are the evidences of the spread of Lutheranism in these early years, naturally it as yet had few prominent adherents. When Erasmus wrote Luther that he had well-wishers {282} [Sidenote: May, 1519] in England, and those of the greatest, he was exaggerating or misinformed. At most he may have been thinking of John Colet, whose death in September, 1519, came before he could take any part in the religious controversy.

At an early date the government took its stand against the heresy. Luther's books were examined by a committee of the University of Cambridge, [Sidenote: 1520] condemned and burnt by them, and soon afterwards by the government. At St. Paul's in London, [Sidenote: May 12, 1521] in the presence of many high dignitaries and a crowd of thirty thousand spectators Luther's books were burnt and his doctrine "reprobated" in addresses by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Cardinal Wolsey. A little later it was forbidden to read, import or keep such works, and measures were taken to enforce this law. Commissions searched for the said pamphlets; stationers and merchants were put under bond not to trade in them; and the German merchants of the Steelyard were examined. When it was discovered [Sidenote: 1526] that these foreigners had stopped "the mass of the body of Christ," commonly celebrated by them in All Hallows' Church the Great, at London, they were haled before Wolsey's legatine court, forced to acknowledge its jurisdiction, and dealt with.

With one accord the leading Englishmen declared against Luther. Cuthbert Tunstall, a mathematician and diplomatist, and later Bishop of London, wrote Wolsey from Worms of the devotion of the Germans to their leader, and sent to him The Babylonian Captivity with the comment, "there is much strange opinion in it near to the opinions of Boheme; I pray God keep that book out of England." [Sidenote: January 21, 1521] Wolsey himself, biassed perhaps by his ambition for the tiara, labored to suppress the heresy. Most important of all, Sir Thomas More was promptly and decisively alienated. {283} It was More, according to Henry VIII, who "by subtle, sinister slights unnaturally procured and provoked him" to write against the heretic. His Defence of the Seven Sacraments, in reply to the Babylonian Captivity, though an extremely poor work, was greeted, on its appearance, as a masterpiece. [Sidenote: July, 1521] The handsome copy bound in gold, sent to Leo X, was read to the pope and declared by him the best antidote to heresy yet produced. In recognition of so valuable an arm, or of so valiant a champion, the pope granted an indulgence of ten years and ten periods of forty days to the readers of the book, and to its author the long coveted title Defender of the Faith. Luther answered the king with ridicule and the controversy was continued by Henry's henchmen More, Fisher, and others. Stung to the quick, Henry, who had already urged the emperor to crush the heretic, now wrote with the same purpose to the elector and dukes of Saxony and to other German princes.

[Sidenote: Growth of Lutheranism]

But while the chief priests and rulers were not slow to reject the new "gospel," the common people heard it gladly. The rapid diffusion of Lutheranism is proved by many a side light and by the very proclamations issued from time to time to "resist the damnable heresies" or to suppress tainted books. John Heywood's The Four P's: a merry Interlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary and a Pedlar, written about 1528 though not published until some years later, is full of Lutheran doctrine, and so is another book very popular at the time, Simon Fish's Supplication of Beggars. John Skelton's Colyn Clout, [Sidenote: c. 1522] a scathing indictment of the clergy, mentions that

Some have smacke
Of Luther's sacke,
And a brennyng sparke
Of Luther's warke.

{284} [Sidenote: William Tyndale's Bible]

But the acceptance of the Reformation, as apart from mere grumbling at the church, could not come until a Protestant literature was built up. In England as elsewhere the most powerful Protestant tract was the vernacular Bible. Owing to the disfavor in which Wyclif's doctrines were held, no English versions had been printed until the Protestant divine William Tyndale highly resolved to make the holy book more familiar to the ploughboy than to the bishop.

Educated at both Oxford and Cambridge, Tyndale imbibed the doctrines first of Erasmus, then of Luther, and finally of Zwingli. Applying for help in his project to the bishop of London and finding none, [Sidenote: 1524] he sailed for Germany where he completed a translation of the New Testament, and started printing it at Cologne. Driven hence by the intervention of Cochlaeus and the magistrates, he went to Worms and got another printer to finish the job. [Sidenote: 1526] Of the six thousand copies in the first edition many were smuggled to England, where Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, tried to buy them all up, "thinking," as the chronicler Hall phrased it, "that he had God by the toe when he indeed had the devil by the fist." The money went to Tyndale and was used to issue further editions, of which no less than seven appeared in the next ten years.

The government's attitude was that

Having respect to the malignity of this present time, with the inclination of the people to erroneous opinions, the translation of the New Testament should rather be the occasion of continuance or increase of errors among the said people than any benefit or commodity towards the weal of their souls.

But the magistrates were unable to quench the fiery zeal of Tyndale who continued to translate parts of the Old Testament and to print them and other tracts at Antwerp and at Cologne, until his martyrdom at {285} Vilvorde, near Brussels, on October 6, 1536. In 1913 a monument was erected on the place of his death.

Under the leadership of Tyndale on the one side and of More on the other the air became dark with a host of controversial tracts. [Sidenote: Controversial tracts] They are half filled with theological metaphysic, half with the bitterest invective. Luther called Henry VIII "a damnable and rotten worm, a snivelling, drivelling swine of a sophist"; More retorted by complaining of the violent language of "this apostate, this open incestuous lecher, this plain limb of the devil and manifest messenger of hell." Absurd but natural tactic, with a sure effect on the people, which relishes both morals and scandal! To prove that faith justifies, the Protestants pointed to the debauchery of the friars; to prove the mass a sacrifice their enemies mocked at "Friar Martin and Gate Callate his nun lusking together in lechery." But with all the invective there was much solid argument of the kind that appealed to an age of theological politics. In England as elsewhere the significance of the Reformation was that it was the first issue of supreme importance to be argued by means of the press before the bar of a public opinion sufficiently enlightened to appreciate its importance and sufficiently strong to make a choice and to enforce its decision.

The party of the Reformation in England at first consisted of two classes, London tradesmen and certain members of what Bismarck long afterward called "the learned proletariat." In 1532 the bishops were able to say:

In the crime of heresy, thanked be God, there hath no
notable person fallen in our time. Truth it is that
certain apostate friars and monks, lewd priests, bankrupt
merchants, vagabonds and lewd, idle fellows of corrupt
nature have embraced the abominable and erroneous
{286}
opinions lately sprung in Germany and by them have
been some seduced in simplicity and ignorance.

[Sidenote: Anti-clerical feeling]

But though both anti-clerical feeling and sympathy with the new doctrines waxed apace, it is probable that no change would have taken place for many years had it not been for the king's divorce. The importance of this episode, born of the most strangely mingled motives of conscience, policy, and lust, is not that, as sometimes said, it proved the English people ready to follow their government in religious matters as sheep follow their shepherd. Its importance is simply that it loosed England from its ancient moorings of papal supremacy, and thus established one, though only one, of the cardinal principles of the Protestant revolt. The Reformation consisted not only in a religions change but in an assertion of nationalism, in a class revolt, and in certain cultural revolutions. It was only the first that the government had any idea of sanctioning, but by so doing it enabled the people later to take matters into their own hands and add the social and cultural elements. Thus the Reformation in England ran a course quite different from that in Germany. In the former the cultural revolution came first, followed fast by the rising of the lower and the triumph of the middle classes. Last of all came the successful realization of a national state. But in England nationalism came first; then under Edward the economic revolution; and lastly, under the Puritans, the transmutation of spiritual values.

[Sidenote: Divorce of Catherine of Aragon]

The occasion of the breach with Rome was the divorce of Henry from Catharine of Aragon, who had previously married his brother Arthur when they were both fifteen, and had lived with him as his wife for five months until his death. As marriage with a brother's widow was forbidden by Canon Law, a {287} dispensation from the pope had been secured, to enable Catharine to marry Henry. The king's scruples about the legality of the act were aroused by the death of all the queen's children, save the Princess Mary, in which he saw the fulfilment of the curse denounced in Leviticus xx, 21: "If a man shall take his brother's wife . . . they shall be childless." Just at this time Henry fell in love with Anne Boleyn, [Sidenote: Anne Boleyn] and this further increased his dissatisfaction with his present estate.

He therefore applied to the pope for annulment of marriage, but the unhappy Clement VII, now in the emperor's fist, felt unable to give it to him. He writhed and twisted, dallied with the proposals that Henry should take a second wife, or that his illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond should marry his half sister Mary; in short he was ready to grant a dispensation for anything save for the one horrible crime of divorce—as the annulment was then called. His difficulties in getting at the rights of the question were not made easier by the readiness of both parties to commit a little perjury or to forge a little bull to further their cause.

Seeing no help in sight from Rome Henry began to collect the opinions of universities and "strange doctors." The English, French, and Italian universities decided as the king wished that his marriage was null; Wittenberg and Marburg rendered contrary opinions. Many theologians, including Erasmus, Luther, and Melanchthon, expressed the opinion that bigamy would be the best way to meet the situation.

But more was needed to make the annulment legal than the verdict of universities. Repulsed by Rome Henry was forced to make an alliance, though it proved but a temporary one, with the Reforming and anti-clerical parties in his realm. At Easter, 1529, Lutheran books began to circulate at court, books {288} advocating the confiscation of ecclesiastical property and the reduction of the church to a state of primitive simplicity. To Chapuis, the imperial ambassador, Henry pointedly praised Luther, whom he had lately called "a wolf of hell and a limb of Satan," remarking that though he had mixed heresy in his books that was not sufficient reason for reproving and rejecting the many truths he had brought to light. To punish Wolsey for the failure to secure what was wanted from Rome, [Sidenote: November 4, 1530] the pampered minister was arrested for treason, but died of chagrin before he could be executed. "Had I served my God," said he, "as diligently as I have served my king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs."

[Sidenote: Reformation Parliament, November 3, 1529]

In the meantime there had already met that Parliament that was to pass, in the seven years of its existence, the most momentous and revolutionary laws as yet placed upon the statute-books. The elections were free, or nearly so; the franchise varied from a fairly democratic one in London to a highly oligarchical one in some boroughs. Notwithstanding the popular feeling that Catharine was an injured woman and that war with the Empire might ruin the valuable trade with Flanders, the "government," as would now be said, that is, the king, received hearty support by the majority of members. The only possible explanation for this, apart from the king's acknowledged skill as a parliamentary leader, is the strength of the anti-clerical feeling. The rebellion of the laity against the clergy, and of the patriots against the Italian yoke, needed but the example of Germany to burst all the dykes and barriers of medieval custom. The significance of the revolution was that it was a forcible reform of the church by the state. The wish of the people was to end ecclesiastical abuses without much regard to doctrine; the wish of the king was to make himself {289} "emperor and pope" in his own dominions. While Henry studied Wyclif's program, and the people read the English Testament, the lessons they derived from these sources were at first moral and political, not doctrinal or philosophic.

[Sidenote: Submission of the clergy, December 1530]

The first step in the reduction of the church was taken when the attorney-general filed in the court of King's Bench an information against the whole body of the clergy for violating the statutes of Provisors and Praemunire by having recognized Wolsey's legatine authority. Of course there was no justice in this; the king himself had recognized Wolsey's authority and anyone who had denied it would have been punished. But the suit was sufficient to accomplish the government's purposes, which were, first to wring money from the clergy and then to force them to declare the king "sole protector and supreme head of the church and clergy of England." Reluctantly the Convocation of Canterbury accepted this demand in the form that the king was, "their singular protector, only and supreme lord and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even Supreme Head." Henry further proposed that the oaths of the clergy to the pope be abolished and himself made supreme legislator. [Sidenote: May 15, 1532] Convocation accepted this demand also in a document known as "the submission of the clergy."

If such was the action of the spiritual estate, it was natural that the temporal peers and the Commons in parliament should go much further. [Sidenote: 1532] A petition of the Commons, really emanating from the government and probably from Thomas Cromwell, complained bitterly of the tyranny of the ordinaries in ecclesiastical jurisdiction, of excessive fees and vexations and frivolous charges of heresy made against unlearned laymen. [Sidenote: May 1532] Abuses of like nature were dealt with in statutes limiting the fees exacted by priests and regulating {290} pluralities and non-residence. Annates were abolished with the proviso that the king might negotiate with the pope,—the intention of the government being thus to bring pressure to bear on the curia. No wonder the clergy were thoroughly frightened. Bishop Fisher, their bravest champion, protested in the House of Lords: "For God's sake, see what a realm the kingdom of Boheme was, and when the church fell down, there fell the glory of the kingdom. Now with the Commons is nothing but 'Down with the church,' and all this meseemeth is for lack of faith only."

[Sidenote: Marriage with Anne Boleyn]

It had taken Henry several years to prepare the way for his chief object, the divorce. His hand was at last forced by the knowledge that Anne was pregnant; he married her on January 25, 1533, without waiting for final sentence of annulment of marriage with Catharine. In so doing he might seem, at first glance, to have followed the advice so freely tendered him to discharge his conscience by committing bigamy; but doubtless he regarded his first marriage as illegal all the time and merely waited for the opportunity to get a court that would so pronounce it. The vacancy of the archbishopric of Canterbury enabled him to appoint to it Thomas Cranmer, [Sidenote: Cranmer] the obsequious divine who had first suggested his present plan. Cranmer was a Lutheran, so far committed to the new faith that he had married; he was intelligent, learned, a wonderful master of language, and capable at last of dying for his belief. But that he showed himself pliable to his master's wishes beyond all bounds of decency is a fact made all the more glaring by the firm and honorable conduct of More and Fisher. His worst act was possibly on the occasion of his nomination to the province of Canterbury; wishing to be confirmed by the pope he concealed his real views and took an oath of obedience to the Holy See, having previously signed {291} a protest that he considered the oath a mere form and not a reality.

The first use he made of his position was to pronounce sentence that Henry and Catharine had never been legally married, though at the same time asserting that this did not affect the legitimacy of Mary because her parents had believed themselves married. Immediately afterwards it was declared that Anne was a lawful wife, and she was crowned queen, [Sidenote: 1533] amid the smothered execrations of the populace, on June 1. On September 7, the Princess Elizabeth was born. Catharine's cause was taken up at Rome; Clement's brief forbidding the king to remarry was followed by final sentence in Catharine's favor. Her last years were rendered miserable by humiliation and acts of petty spite. When she died her late husband, with characteristic indecency, [Sidenote: January 1536] celebrated the joyous event by giving a ball at which he and Anne appeared dressed in yellow.

[Sidenote: March 1534]

The feeling of the people showed itself in this case finer and more chivalrous than that prevalent at court. The treatment of Catharine was so unpopular that Chapuis wrote that the king was much hated by his subjects. [Sidenote: January, 1536] Resolved to make an example of the murmurers, the government selected Elizabeth Barton, the "Holy Maid of Kent." After her hysterical visions and a lucky prophecy had won her an audience, she fell under the influence of monks and prophesied that the king would not survive his marriage with Anne one month, and proclaimed that he was no longer king in the eyes of God. [Sidenote: April 1, 1534] She and her accomplices were arrested, attainted without trial, and executed. She may pass as an English Catholic martyr.

[Sidenote: Act in Restraint of Appeals, February 1533]

Continuing its course of making the king absolute master the Parliament passed an Act in Restraint of Appeals, the first constitutional break with Rome. {292} The theory of the government was set forth in the preamble:

Whereas by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king . . . unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms, and by names of spirituality and temporally, be bounden and ought to bear, next to God, a natural and humble obedience. . . .

therefore all jurisdiction of foreign powers was denied.

[Sidenote: January 15, 1534]

When, after a recess, Parliament met again there were forty vacancies to be filled in the Lower House, and this time care was taken that the new members should be well affected. Scarcely a third of the spiritual lords assembled, though whether their absence was commanded, or their presence not required, by the king, is uncertain. As, in earlier Parliaments, the spiritual peers had outnumbered the temporal, this was a matter of importance. Another sign of the secularization of the government was the change in the character of the chancellors. Wolsey was the last great ecclesiastical minister of the reign; More and Cromwell who followed him were laymen.

The severance with Rome was now completed by three laws. In the first place the definite abolition of the annates meant that henceforth the election of archbishops and bishops must be under licence by the king and that they must swear allegiance to him before consecration. A second act forbade the payment of Peter's pence and all other fees to Rome, and vested in the Archbishop of Canterbury the right to grant licences previously granted by the pope. A third act, for the subjection of the clergy, put convocation under the royal power and forbade all privileges inconsistent with this. The new pope, Paul III, struck back, though {293} with hesitation, excommunicating the king, [Sidenote: 1535-8] declaring all his children by Anne Boleyn illegitimate, and absolving his subjects from their oath of allegiance.

[Sidenote: 1534]

Two acts entrenched the king in his despotic pretensions. The Act of Succession, [Sidenote: Act of Succession] notable as the first assertion by crown and Parliament of the right to legislate in this constitutional matter, vested the inheritance of the crown in the issue of Henry and Anne, and made it high treason to question the marriage. The Act of Supremacy [Sidenote: Act of Supremacy] declared that the king's majesty "justly and rightfully is and ought to be supreme head of the church of England," pointedly omitting the qualification insisted on by Convocation,—"as far as the law of Christ allows." Exactly how far this supremacy went was at first puzzling. That it extended not only to the governance of the temporalities of the church, but to issuing injunctions on spiritual matters and defining articles of belief was soon made apparent; on the other hand the monarch never claimed in person the power to celebrate mass.

That the abrogation of the papal authority was accepted so easily is proof of the extent to which the national feeling of the English church had already gone. An oath to recognize the supremacy of the king was tendered to both convocations, to the universities, to the clergy and to prominent laymen, and was with few exceptions readily taken. Doubtless many swallowed the oath from mere cowardice; others took it with mental reservations; and yet that the majority complied shows that the substitution of a royal for a papal despotism was acceptable to the conscience of the country at large. Many believed that they were not departing from the Catholic faith; but that others welcomed the act as a step towards the Reformation cannot be doubted. How strong was the hold of Luther on the country will presently be shown, but here {294} only one instance of the exuberance of the will for a purely national religion need be quoted. "God hath showed himself the God of England, or rather an English God," wrote Hugh Latimer, [Sidenote: 1537] a leading Lutheran; not only the church but the Deity had become insular!

[Sidenote: Fisher]

But there were a few, and among them the greatest, who refused to become accomplices in the break with Roman Christendom. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a friend of Erasmus and a man of admirable steadfastness, had long been horrified by the tyranny of Henry. He had stoutly upheld the rightfulness of Catharine's marriage, and now ho refused to see in the monarch the fit ruler of the church. So strongly did he feel on these subjects that he invited Charles to invade England and depose the king. This was treason, though probably the government that sent him to the tower was ignorant of the act. When Paul III rewarded Fisher by creating him a cardinal [Sidenote: May 20, 1535] Henry furiously declared he would send his head to Rome to get the hat. [Sidenote: June 22] The old man of seventy-six was accordingly beheaded.

[Sidenote: Sir Thomas More executed, July 6]

This execution was followed by that of Sir Thomas More, the greatest ornament of his country. As More has been remembered almost entirely by his noble Utopia and his noble death, it is hard to estimate his character soberly. That his genius was polished to the highest perfection, that in a hard age he had an altogether lovely sympathy with the poor, and in a servile age the courage of his convictions, would seem enough to excuse any faults. But a deep vein of fanaticism ran through his whole nature and tinctured all his acts, political, ecclesiastical, and private. Not only was his language violent in the extreme, but his acts were equally merciless when his passions were aroused. Appointed chancellor after the fall of Wolsey, he did not scruple to hit the man who was down, describing {295} him, in a scathing speech in Parliament, as the scabby wether separated by the careful shepherd from the sound sheep. In his hatred of the new opinions he not only sent men to death and torture for holding them, but reviled them while doing it. "Heretics as they be," he wrote, "the clergy doth denounce them. And as they be well worthy, the temporality doth burn them. And after the fire of Smithfield, hell doth receive them, where the wretches burn for ever."

As chancellor he saw with growing disapproval the course of the tyrant. He opposed the marriage with Anne Boleyn. The day after the submission of the clergy he resigned the great seal. He could not long avoid further offence to his master, and his refusal to take the oath of supremacy was the crime for which he was condemned. His behaviour during his last days and on the scaffold was perfect. He spent his time in severe self-discipline; he uttered eloquent words of forgiveness of his enemies, messages of love to the daughter whom he tenderly loved, and brave jests.

[Sidenote: Anabaptist martyrs, 1536]

But while More's passion was one that any man might envy, his courage was shared by humbler martyrs. In the same year in which he was beheaded thirteen Dutch Anabaptists were burnt, as he would have approved, by the English government. Mute, inglorious Christs, they were led like sheep to the slaughter and as lambs dumb before their shearers. They had no eloquence, no high position, to make their words ring from side to side of Europe and echo down the centuries; but their meek endurance should not go unremembered.

To take More's place as chief minister Henry appointed the most obsequious tool he could find, Thomas Cromwell. [Sidenote: Thomas Cromwell, 1485?-1540] To good purpose this man had studied Machiavelli's Prince as a practical manual of tyranny. His most important service to the crown was the {296} next step in the reduction of the medieval church, the dissolution of the monasteries. [Sidenote: Dissolution of the monasteries] Like other acts tending towards the Reformation this was, on the whole, popular, and had been rehearsed on a small scale on several previous occasions in English history. The pope and the king of France taught Edward II to dissolve the preceptories, to the number of twenty-three, belonging to the Templars; in 1410 the Commons petitioned for the confiscation of all church property; in 1414 the alien priories in England fell under the animadversion of the government; their property was handed over to the crown and they escaped only by the payment of heavy fines, by incorporation into English orders, and by partial confiscation of their land. The idea prevailed that mortmain had failed of its object and that therefore the church might rightfully be relieved of her ill-gotten gains. These were grossly exaggerated, a pamphleteer believing that the wealth of the church amounted to half the property of the realm. In reality the total revenue of the spirituality amounted to only L320,000; that of the monasteries to only L140,000. There had been few endowments in the fifteenth century; only eight new ones, in fact, in the whole period 1399-1509. Colleges, schools, and hospitals now attracted the money that had previously gone to the monks.

Moreover, the monastic life had fallen on evil days. The abbeys no longer were centers of learning and of the manufacture of books. The functions of hospitality and of charity that they still exercised were not sufficient to redeem them in the eyes of the people for the "gross, carnal, and vicious living" with which they were commonly and quite rightly charged. Visitations undertaken not by hostile governments but by bishops in the fifteenth century prove that much immorality obtained within the cloister walls. By 1528 {297} they had become so intolerable that a popular pamphleteer, Simon Fish, in his Supplication of Beggars, proposed that the mendicant friars be entirely suppressed.

[Sidenote: January 21, 1535]

A commission was now issued to Thomas Cromwell, empowering him to hold a general visitation of all churches, monasteries, and collegiate bodies. The evidence gathered of the shocking disorders obtaining in the cloisters of both sexes is on the whole credible and well substantiated. Nevertheless these disorders furnished rather the pretext than the real reason for the dissolutions that followed. Cromwell boasted that he would make his king the richest in Christendom, and this was the shortest and most popular way to do it.

[Sidenote: 1536]

Accordingly an act was passed for the dissolution of all small religious houses with an income of less than L200 a year. The rights of the founders were safe-guarded, and pensions guaranteed to those inmates who did not find shelter in one of the larger establishments. By this act 376 houses were dissolved with an aggregate revenue of L32,000, not counting plate and jewels confiscated. Two thousand monks or nuns were affected in addition to about eight thousand retainers or servants. The immediate effect was a large amount of misery, but the result in the long run was good. Perhaps the principal political importance of this and the subsequent spoliations of the church was to make the Reformation profitable and therefore popular with an enterprising class. For the lion's share of the prey did not go to the lion, but to the jackals. From the king's favorites to whom he threw the spoils was founded a new aristocracy, a class with a strong vested interest in opposing the restoration of the papal church. To the Protestant citizens of London was now added a Protestant landed gentry.

{298} [Sidenote: Union with Wales, 1536]

Before the "Reformation Parliament" had ceased to exist, one more act of great importance was passed. Wales was a wild country, imperfectly governed by irregular means. By the first Act of Union in British history, Wales was now incorporated with England and the anomalies, or distinctions, in its legal and administrative system, wiped out. By severe measures, in the course of which 5000 men were sent to the gallows, the western mountaineers were reduced to order during the years 1534-40; and in 1543 their union with England was completed. The measure was statesmanlike and successful; it was undoubtedly aided by the loyalty of the Welsh to their own Tudor dynasty.

[Sidenote: April 14, 1536]

When Parliament dissolved after having accomplished, during its seven years, the greatest permanent revolution in the history of England, it had snapped the bands with Rome and determined articles of religious belief; it had given the king more power in the church than the pope ever had, and had exalted his prerogative in the state to a pitch never reached before or afterwards; it had dissolved the smaller monasteries, abridged the liberties of the subject, settled the succession to the throne, created new treasons and heresies; it had handled grave social problems, like enclosures and mendicancy; and had united Wales to England.

[Sidenote: Execution of Anne Boleyn]

And now the woman for whose sake, one is tempted to say, the king had done it all—though of course his share in the revolution does not represent the real forces that accomplished it—the woman he had won with "such a world of charge and hell of pain," was to be cast into the outer darkness of the most hideous tragedy in history. Anne Boleyn was not a good woman. And yet, when she was accused of adultery [Sidenote: May 19, 1536] with four men and of incest with her own brother, {299} though she was tried by a large panel of peers, condemned, and beheaded, it is impossible to be sure of her guilt.

[Sidenote: Jane Seymour]

On the day following Anne's execution or, as some say, on May 30, Henry married his third wife, Jane Seymour. On October 12, 1537, she bore him a son, Edward. Forced by her husband to take part in the christening, an exhausting ceremony too much for her strength, she sickened and died soon afterwards.

[Sidenote: Lutheran tracts]

In the meantime the Lutheran movement was growing apace in England. In the last two decades of Henry's reign seven of Luther's tracts and some of his hymns were translated into English. Five of the tracts proved popular enough to be reprinted. One of them was The Liberty of a Christian Man, turned into English by John Tewkesbury whom, having died for his faith, More called "a stinking martyr." The hymns and some of the other tracts were Englished by Miles Coverdale. In addition to this there was translated an account of Luther's death in 1546, the Augsburg Confession and four treatises of Melanchthon, and one each of Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Bullinger,—this last reprinted. Of course these versions are not a full measure of Lutheran influence, but a mere barometer. The party now numbered powerful preachers like Latimer and Ridley; Thomas Cranmer the Archbishop of Canterbury and Thomas Cromwell, since May, 1534, the king's principal secretary. The adherence of the last named to the Reforming party is perhaps the most significant sign of the times. As his only object was to be on the winning side, and as he had not a bit of real religious interest, it makes it all the more impressive that, believing the cat was about to jump in the direction of Lutheranism, he should have tried to put himself in the line of its trajectory {300} by doing all he could to foster the Reformers at home and the Protestant alliance abroad.

[Sidenote: Coverdale, 1488?-1569]

One of the decisive factors in the Reformation again proved to be the English Bible, completed, after the end of Tyndale's labors by a man of less scholarship but equally happy mastery of language, Miles Coverdale. Of little original genius, he spent his life largely in the labor of translating tracts and treatises by the German Reformers into his native tongue. [Sidenote: The English Bible, 1535] His first great work was the completion of the English Bible which was published by Christopher Froschauer of Zurich in 1535, the title-page stating that it had been translated "out of Douche and Latyn"—the "Douche" being, of course, Luther's German version. For the New Testament and for the Old Testament as far as the end of Chronicles, Tyndale's version was used; the rest was by Coverdale. The work was dedicated to the king, and, as Cromwell had already been considering the advisability of authorizing the English Bible, this was not an unwelcome thing. But as the government was as yet unprepared to recognize work avowedly based on German Protestant versions, [Sidenote: 1537] they resorted to the device of re-issuing the Bible with the name of Thomas Matthew as translator, though in fact it consisted entirely of the work of Tyndale and Coverdale. [Sidenote: 1538-9] A light revision of this work was re-issued as the Great Bible, [Sidenote: October 11, 1538] and Injunctions were issued by Cromwell ordering a Bible of the largest size to be set up in every church, and the people to be encouraged to read it. They were also to be taught the Lord's prayer and creed in English, spiritual sermons were to be preached, and superstitions, such as going on pilgrimages, burning candles to saints, and kissing and licking relics, were to be discouraged.

At the same time Cromwell diligently sought a rapprochement with the German Protestants. The idea {301} was an obvious one that, having won the enmity of Charles, England should support his dangerous intestine enemies, the Schmalkaldic princes. In that day of theological politics it was natural to try to find cement for the alliance in a common confession. Embassy after embassy made pilgrimages to Wittenberg, where the envoys had long discussions with the Reformers [Sidenote: January, 1536] both about the divorce and about matters of faith. They took back with them to England, together with a personal letter from Luther to Cromwell, [Sidenote: April] a second opinion unfavorable to the divorce and a confession drawn up in Seventeen Articles. In this, though in the main it was, as it was called, "a repetition and exegesis of the Augsburg Confession," considerable concessions were made to the wishes of the English. Melanchthon was the draughtsman and Luther the originator of the articles.

This symbol now became the basis of the first definition of faith drawn up by the government. Some such statement was urgently needed, for, amid the bewildering acts of the Reformation Parliament, the people hardly knew what the king expected them to believe. The king therefore presented to Convocation a Book of Articles of Faith and Ceremonies, [Sidenote: July 11 The Book of Articles] commonly called the Ten Articles, drafted by Fox on the basis of the memorandum he had received at Wittenberg, in close substantial and frequently in verbal agreement with it. By this confession the Bible, the three creeds, and the acts of the first four councils were designated as authoritative; the three Lutheran sacraments of baptism, penance, and the altar were retained; justification by faith and good works jointly was proclaimed; the use of images was allowed and purgatory disallowed; the real presence in the sacrament was strongly affirmed. The significance of the articles, however, is not so much their Lutheran provenance, as in their promulgation {302} by the crown. It was the last step in the enslavement of religion. "This king," as Luther remarked, "wants to be God. He founds articles of faith, which even the pope never did."

[Sidenote: The Pilgrimage of Grace]

It only remained to see what the people would say to the new order. Within a few months after the dissolution of the Reformation Parliament and the publication of the Ten Articles, the people in the north spread upon the page of history an extremely emphatic protest. For this is really what the Pilgrimage of Grace was—not a rebellion against king, property, or any established institution, but a great demonstration against the policy for which Cromwell became the scapegoat. In those days of slow communication opinions travelled on the beaten roads of commerce. As late as Mary's reign there is proof that Protestantism was confined to the south, east, and midlands,—roughly speaking to a circle with London as its center and a radius of one hundred miles. In these earlier years, Protestant opinion was probably even more confined; London was both royalist and anti-Roman Catholic; the ports on the south-eastern coast, including Calais, at that time an English station in France, and the university towns had strong Lutheran and still stronger anti-clerical parties.

But in the wilds of the north and west it was different. There, hardly any bourgeois class of traders existed to adopt "the religion of merchants" as Protestantism has been called. Perhaps more important was the mere slowness of the diffusion of ideas. The good old ways were good enough for men who never knew anything else. The people were discontented with the high taxes, and the nobles, who in the north retained feudal affections if not feudal power, were outraged by the ascendency in the royal councils of low-born upstarts. Moreover, it seems that the clergy {303} were stronger in the north even before the inroads of the new doctrines. In the suppression of the lesser monasteries Yorkshire, the largest county in England, had lost the most foundations, 53 in all, and Lincolnshire the next most, 37. Irritation at the suppression itself was greatly increased among the clergy by the insolence and thoroughness of the visitation, in which not only monasteries but parish priests had been examined. In resisting the king in the name of the church the priests had before them the example of the most popular English saint, Thomas Becket. They were the real fomenters of the demonstration, and the gentlemen, not the people, its leaders.

Rioting began in Lincolnshire on October 1, 1536, and before the end of the month 40,000 men had joined the movement. A petition to the king was drawn up demanding that the church holidays be kept as before, that the church be relieved of the payment of first-fruits and tithes, that the suppressed houses be restored except those which the king "kept for his pleasure only," that taxes be reduced and some unpopular officials banished.

Henry thundered an answer in his most high and mighty style: "How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm, and of least experience to find fault with your prince in the electing of his councillors and prelates!" He at once dispatched an army with orders "to invade their countries, to burn, spoil and destroy their goods, wives and children." [Sidenote: March 1537] Repression of the rising in Lincolnshire was followed by the execution of forty-six leaders.

But the movement had promptly spread to Yorkshire, where men gathered as for a peaceable demonstration, [Sidenote: October 1536] and swore not to enter "this pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth, save only for the {304} maintenance of God's faith and church militant, preservation of the king's person, and purifying the nobility of all villein's blood and evil counsellors, to the restitution of Christ's church and the suppression of heretics' opinions." In Yorkshire it was feared that the money extorted from the abbeys was going to London; and that the new treason's acts would operate harshly. Cumberland and Westmoreland soon joined the rising, their special grievance being the economic one of the rise of rents, or rather of the heavy fines exacted by landlords on the renewal of leases. An army of 35,000 was raised by the insurgents but their leader, Robert Aske, did not wish to fight, though he was opposed by only 8,000 royal troops. He preferred a parley and demanded, in addition to a free pardon, the acceptance of the northern demands, the summons of a free Parliament, the restoration of the papal supremacy as touching the cure of souls, and the suppression of the books of Tyndale, Huss, Luther, and Melanchthon. The king invited Aske to a personal interview, and promised to accede to the demand for a Parliament if the petitioners would disperse. An act of violence on a part of a few of the northerners was held to absolve the government, and Henry, having gathered his forces, demanded, and secured, a "dreadful execution" of vengeance.

Though the Pilgrimage of Grace had some effect in warning Henry not to dabble in foreign heresies, the policy he had most at heart, that of making himself absolute in state and church, went on apace. The culmination of the growth of the royal power is commonly seen in the Statute of Proclamations [Sidenote: Statute of Proclamations, 1539] apparently giving the king's proclamations the same validity as law save when they touched the lives, liberty, or property of subjects or were repugnant to existing statutes. Probably, however, the intent of Parliament was not {305} to confer new powers on the crown but to regulate the enforcement of already existing prerogatives. As a matter of fact no proclamations were issued during the last years of Henry's reign that might not have been issued before.

But the reform of the church by the government, in morals and usages, not in doctrine, proceeded unchecked. The larger monasteries had been falling into the king's hands by voluntary surrender ever since 1536; a new visitation and a new Act for the dissolution [Sidenote: 1539] of the greater monasteries completed the process.

[Sidenote: War on relics]

An iconoclastic war was now begun not, as in other countries, by the mob, but by the government. Relics like the Blood of Hailes were destroyed, and the Rood of Boxley, a crucifix mechanically contrived so that the priests made it nod and smile or shake its head and frown according to the liberality of its worshipper, was taken down and the mechanism exposed in various places. At Walsingham in Norfolk was a nodding image of the Virgin, a bottle of her milk, still liquid, and a knuckle of St. Peter. The shrine, ranking though it did with Loretto and Compostella in popular veneration, was now destroyed. With much zest the government next attacked the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, thus revenging the humiliation of another Henry at the hands of the church. The martyr was now declared to be a rebel who had fled from the realm.

[Sidenote: 1536]

The definition of doctrine, coupled with negotiations with the Schmalkaldic princes, continued briskly. The project for an alliance came to nothing, for John Frederic of Saxony wrote that God would not allow them to have communication with Henry. Two embassies to England engaged in assiduous, but fruitless, theological discussion. Henry himself, with the aid of Cuthbert Tunstall, drew up a long statement "against {306} the opinions of the Germans on the sacrament in both kinds, private masses, and sacerdotal marriage." The reactionary tendency of the English is seen in the Institution of the Christian Man, [Sidenote: Definitions of Faith] published with royal authority, and still more in the Act of the Six Articles. [Sidenote: 1537] In the former the four sacraments previously discarded are again "found." [Sidenote: 1539] In the latter, transubstantiation is affirmed, the doctrine of communion in both kinds branded as heresy, the marriage of priests declared void, vows of chastity are made perpetually binding, private masses and auricular confessions are sanctioned. Denial of transubstantiation was made punishable by the stake and forfeiture of goods; those who spoke against the other articles were declared guilty of felony on the second offence. This act, officially entitled "for abolishing diversity in opinions" was really the first act of uniformity. It was carried by the influence of the king and the laity against the parties represented by Cromwell and Cranmer. It ended the plans for a Schmalkaldic alliance. [Sidenote: July 10, 1539] Luther thanked God that they were rid of that blasphemer who had tried to enter their league but failed.

By a desperate gamble Cromwell now tried to save what was left of his pro-German policy. Duke William of Cleves-Jülich-Berg had adopted an Erasmian compromise between Lutheranism and Romanism, in some respects resembling the course pursued by Henry. In this direction Cromwell accordingly next turned and induced his master to contract a marriage with Anne, [Sidenote: January 6, 1540] the duke's sister. As Henry had offered to the European audience three tragedies in his three former marriages, he now, in true Greek style, presented in his fourth a farce or "satyric drama." The monarch did not like his new wife in the least, and found means of ridding himself of her more speedily than was usual even with him. Having shared her bed for six months {307} he divorced her on the ground that the marriage had not been consummated. [Sidenote: July 28, 1540] The ex-queen continued to live as "the king's good sister" with a pension and establishment of her own, but Cromwell vicariously expiated her failure to please. He was attainted, without trial, for treason, and speedily executed.

[Sidenote: Bluebeard's wives]

On the same day Henry married Catharine Howard, a beautiful girl selected by the Catholics to play the same part for them that Anne Boleyn had played for the Lutherans, and who did so more exactly than her backers intended. Like her predecessor she was beheaded for adultery on February 13, 1542. On July 12, 1543, Bluebeard concluded his matrimonial adventures by taking Catharine Parr, a lady who, like Sieyès after the Terror, must have congratulated herself on her rare ability in surviving.

[Sidenote: Catholic reaction]

As a Catholic reaction marked the last eight years of Henry's reign, it may perhaps be well to say a few words about the state of opinion in England at that time. The belief that the whole people took their religion with sheepish meekness from their king is too simple and too dishonorable to the national character to be believed. That they appeared to do this is really a proof that parties were nearly divided. Just as in modern times great issues are often decided in general elections by narrow majorities, so in the sixteenth century public opinion veered now this way, now that, in part guided by the government, in part affecting it even when the channels by which it did so are not obvious. We must not imagine that the people took no interest in the course of affairs. On the contrary the burning issues of the day were discussed in public house and marketplace with the same vivacity with which politics are now debated in the New England country store. "The Word of God was disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and {308} tavern," says a contemporary state paper. In private, graver men argued with the high spirit reflected in More's dialogues.

Four parties may be plainly discerned. First and most numerous were the strict Anglicans, orthodox and royalist, comprising the greater part of the crown-loving, priest-hating and yet, in intellectual matters, conservative common people. Secondly, there were the pope's followers, still strong in numbers especially among the clergy and in the north. Their leaders were among the most high-minded of the nation, but were also the first to be smitten by the king's wrath which, as his satellites were always repeating in Latin proverb, meant death. Such men were More and Fisher and the London Carthusians executed in 1535 for refusing the oath of supremacy. Third, there were the Lutherans, an active and intelligent minority of city merchants and artisans, led by men of conspicuous talents and generally of high character, like Coverdale, Kidley, and Latimer. With these leaders were a few opportunists like Cranmer and a few Machiavellians like Cromwell. Lastly there was a very small contingent of extremists, Zwinglians and Anabaptists, all classed together as blasphemers and as social agitators. Their chief notes were the variety of their opinions and the unanimity of their persecution by all other parties. Some of them were men of intelligible social and religious tenets; others furnished the "lunatic fringe" of the reform movement. The proclamation banishing them from England [Sidenote: 1538] on pain of death merely continued the previous practice of the government.

The fall of the Cromwell ministry, if it may be so termed by modern analogy, was followed by a government in which Henry acted as his own prime minister. {309} He had made good his boast that if his shirt knew his counsel he would strip it off.[1] Two of his great ministers he had cast down for being too Catholic, one for being too Protestant. Having procured laws enabling him to burn Romanists as traitors and Lutherans as heretics, he established a régime of pure Anglicanism, the only genuine Anglican Catholicism, however much it may have been imitated in after centuries, that ever existed.

[Sidenote: Anti-protestant measures]

Measures were at once taken towards suppressing the Protestants and their Bible. One of the first martyrs was Robert Barnes, a personal friend of Luther. Much stir was created by the burning, some years later, of a gentlewoman named Anne Askewe and of three men, at Smithfield. The revulsion naturally caused by this cruelty prepared the people for the Protestant rule of Edward. The Bible was also attacked. The translation of 1539 was examined by Convocation in 1540 and criticized for not agreeing more closely with the Latin. In 1543 all marginal notes were obliterated and the lower classes forbidden to read the Bible at all.

Henry's reign ended as it began with war on France and Scotland, but with little success. The government was put to dire straits to raise money. A forced loan of 10 per cent. on property was exacted in 1542 and repudiated by law the next year. An income tax rising from four pence to two shillings in the pound on goods and from eight pence to three shillings on revenue from land, was imposed. Crown lands were sold or mortgaged. The last and most disastrous expedient was the debasement of the coinage, the old equivalent of the modern issue of irredeemable paper. As a consequence of this prices rose enormously.

[1] The metaphor came from Erasmus, De lingua, 1525, Opera, iv, 682, where the words are attributed to Caecilius Metellus.

{310}

SECTION 2. THE REFORMATION UNDER EDWARD VI. 1547-1553

[Sidenote: Accession of Edward VI, January 28, 1547]

The real test of the popularity of Henry's double revolution, constitutional and religious, came when England was no longer guided by his strong personality, but was ruled by a child and governed by a weak and shifting regency. It is significant that, whereas the prerogative of the crown was considerably relaxed, though substantially handed on to Edward's stronger successors, the Reformation proceeded at accelerated pace.

[Sidenote: Somerset Regent]

Henry himself, not so much to insure further change as to safeguard that already made, appointed Reformers as his son's tutors and made the majority of the Council of Regency Protestant. The young king's maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was chosen by the council as Protector and created Duke of Somerset. [Sidenote: 1547] Mildness was the characteristic of his rule. He ignored Henry's treason and heresy acts even before they had been repealed.

[Sidenote: Repeal of treason and heresy laws]

The first general election was held with little government interference. Parliament may be assumed to have expressed the will of the nation when it repealed Henry's treason and heresy laws, the ancient act De Haeretico comburendo, the Act of the Six Articles, and the Statute of Proclamations.

To ascertain exactly what, at a given time, is the "public opinion" of a political group, is one of the most difficult tasks of the historian.[1] Even nowadays it is certain that the will of the majority is frequently not reflected either in the acts of the legislature or in the newspaper press. It cannot even be said that the wishes of the majority are always public opinion. In expressing the voice of the people there is generally some section more vocal, more powerful on account {311} of wealth or intelligence, and more deeply in earnest than any other; and this minority, though sometimes a relatively small one, imposes its will in the name of the people and identifies its voice with the voice of God.

[Sidenote: Protestant public opinion]

Therefore, when we read the testimony of contemporaries that the majority of England was still Catholic by the middle of the sixteenth century, a further analysis of popular opinion must be made to account for the apparently spontaneous rush of the Reformation. Some of these estimates are doubtless exaggerations, as that of Paget who wrote in 1549 that eleven Englishmen out of twelve were Catholics. But conceding, as we must, that a considerable majority was still anti-Protestant, it must be remembered that this majority included most of the indifferent and listless and almost all those who held their opinions for no better reason than they had inherited them and refused the trouble of thinking about them. Nearly the solid north and west, the country districts and the unrepresented and mute proletariat of the cities, counted as Catholic but hardly counted for anything else. The commercial class of the towns and the intellectual class, which, though relatively small, then as now made public opinion as measured by all ordinary tests, was predominantly and enthusiastically Protestant.

If we analyse the expressed wishes of England, we shall find a mixture of real religious faith and of worldly, and sometimes discreditable, motives. A new party always numbers among its constituency not only those who love its principles but those who hate its opponents. With the Protestants were a host of allies varying from those who detested Rome to those who repudiated all religion. Moreover every successful party has a number of hangers-on for the sake of political spoils, and some who follow its fortunes {312} with no purpose save to fish in troubled waters.

But whatever their constituency or relative numbers, the Protestants now carried all before them. In the free religious debate that followed the death of Henry, the press teemed with satires and pamphlets, mostly Protestant. From foreign parts flocked allies, while the native stock of literary ammunition was reinforced by German and Swiss books. In the reign of Edward there were three new translations of Luther's books, five of Melanchthon's, two of Zwingli's, two of Oecolampadius's, three of Bullinger's and four of Calvin's. Many English religious leaders were in correspondence with Bullinger, many with Calvin, and some with Melanchthon. Among the prominent European Protestants called to England during this reign were Bucer and Fagius of Germany, Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochino of Italy, and the Pole John Laski.

The purification of the churches began promptly. [Sidenote: 1547] Images, roods and stained glass windows were destroyed, while the buildings were whitewashed on the inside, properly to express the austerity of the new cult. Evidence shows that these acts, countenanced by the government, were popular in the towns but not in the country districts.

[Sidenote: Book of Common Prayer, 1549]

Next came the preparation of an English liturgy. The first Book of Common Prayer was the work of Cranmer. Many things in it, including some of the most beautiful portions, were translations from the Roman Breviary; but the high and solemn music of its language must be credited to the genius of its translator. Just as the English Bible popularized the Reformation, so the English Prayer Book strengthened and broadened the hold of the Anglican church. Doctrinally, it was a compromise between Romanism, Lutheranism and Calvinism. Its use was enforced by the Act of Uniformity, [Sidenote: 1549] {313} the first and mildest of the statutes that bore that name. Though it might be celebrated in Greek, Latin or Hebrew as well as in English, priests using any other service were punished with loss of benefices and imprisonment.

At this time there must have been an unrecorded struggle in the Council of Regency between the two religious parties, followed by the victory of the innovators. [Sidenote: End of 1549] The pace of the Reformation was at once increased; between 1550 and 1553 England gave up most of what was left of distinctively medieval Catholicism. For one thing, the marriage of priests was now legalized. [Sidenote: Accelerated Reformation] That public opinion was hardly prepared for this as yet is shown by the act itself in which celibacy of the clergy is declared to be the better condition, and marriage only allowed to prevent vice. The people still regarded priests' wives much as concubines and the government spoke of clergymen as "sotted with their wives and children." There is one other bit of evidence, of a most singular character, showing that this and subsequent Acts of Uniformity were not thoroughly enforced. The test of orthodoxy came to be taking the communion occasionally according to the Anglican rite. This was at first expected of everyone and then demanded by law; but the law was evaded by permitting a conscientious objector to hire a substitute to take communion for him.

In 1552 the Prayer Book was revised in a Protestant sense. Bucer had something to do with this revision, and so did John Knox. Little was now left of the mass, nothing of private confession or anointing the sick. Further steps were the reform of the Canon Law and the publication of the Forty-two Articles of Religion. These were drawn up by Cranmer on the basis of thirteen articles agreed upon by a conference of three English Bishops, four English doctors, and two German missionaries, Boyneburg and Myconius, in {314} May, 1538. Cranmer hoped to make his statement irenic; and in fact it contained some Roman and Calvinistic elements, but in the main it was Lutheran. Justification by faith was asserted; only two sacraments were retained. Transubstantiation was denounced as repugnant to Scripture and private masses as "dangerous impostures." The real presence was maintained in a Lutheran sense: the bread was said to be the Body of Christ, and the wine the Blood of Christ, but only after a heavenly and spiritual manner. It was said that by Christ's ordinance the sacrament is not reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.

A reform of the clergy was also undertaken, and was much needed. In 1551 Bishop Hooper found in his diocese of 311 clergymen, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, ten could not say the Lord's Prayer in English, seven could not tell who was its author, and sixty-two were absentees, chiefly because of pluralities.

The notable characteristic of the Edwardian Reformation was its mildness. There were no Catholic martyrs. It is true that heretics coming under the category of blasphemers or deniers of Christianity could still be put to death by common law, and two men were actually executed for speculations about the divinity of Christ, but such cases were wholly exceptional.

[Sidenote: Social disorders]

The social disorders of the time, coming to a head, seemed to threaten England with a rising of the lower classes similar to the Peasants' War of 1525 in Germany. The events in England prove that, however much these ebullitions might be stimulated by the atmosphere of the religious change, they wore not the direct result of the new gospel. In the west of England and in Oxfordshire the lower classes rebelled {315} under the leadership of Catholic priests; in the east the rising, known as Kett's rebellion, took on an Anabaptist character. The real causes of discontent were the same in both cases. The growing wealth of the commercial classes had widened the gap between rich and poor. The inclosures continued to be a grievance, by the ejection of small tenants and the appropriation of common lands. But by far the greatest cause of hardship to the poor was the debasement of the coinage. Wheat, barley, oats and cattle rose in price to two or three times their previous cost, while wages, kept down by law, rose only 11 per cent. No wonder that the condition of the laborer had become impossible.

The demands of the eastern rising, centering at Norwich, bordered on communism. The first was for the enfranchisement of all bondsmen for the reason that Christ had made all men free. Inclosures of commons and private property in game and fish were denounced and further agrarian demands were voiced. The rebels committed no murder and little sacrilege, but vented their passions by slaughtering vast numbers of sheep. All the peasant risings were suppressed by the government, and the economic forces continued to operate against the wasteful agricultural system of the time and in favor of wool-growing and manufacture.

[Sidenote: Execution of Somerset, January 22, 1552]

After five years under Protector Somerset there was a change of government signalized, as usual under Henry VIII, by the execution of the resigning minister. Somerset suffered from the unpopularity of the new religious policy in some quarters and from that following the peasants' rebellion in others. As usual, the government was blamed for the economic evils of the time and for once, in having debased the coinage, justly. Moreover the Protector had been {316} involved by scheming rivals in the odium more than in the guilt of fratricide, for this least bloody of all English ministers in that century, had executed his brother, Thomas, Baron Seymour, a rash and ambitious man rightly supposed to be plotting his own advancement by a royal marriage.

Among the leaders of the Reformation belonging to the class of mere adventurers, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was the ablest and the worst. As the Protector held quasi-royal powers, he could only be deposed by using the person of the young king. Warwick ingratiated himself with Edward and brought the child of thirteen to the council. Of course he could only speak what was taught him, but the name of royalty had so dread a prestige that none dared disobey him. At his command Warwick was created Duke of Northumberland, [Sidenote: Northumberland and Suffolk] and his confederate, Henry Grey Marquis of Dorset, was created Duke of Suffolk. A little later these men, again using the person of the king, had Somerset tried and executed.

The conspirators did not long enjoy their triumph. While Edward lived and was a minor they were safe, but Edward was a consumptive visibly declining. They had no hope of perpetuating their power save to alter the succession, and this they tried to do. Another Earl of Warwick had been a king-maker, why not the present one? Henry VIII's will appointed to succeed him, in case of Edward's death without issue, (1) Mary, (2) Elizabeth, (3) the heirs of his younger sister Mary who had married Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Of this marriage there had been born two daughters, the elder of whom, Frances, married Henry Grey, recently created Duke of Suffolk. The issue of this marriage were three daughters, and the eldest of them, Lady Jane Grey, was picked by the two dukes as the heir to the throne, and was married to {317} Northumberland's son, Guilford Dudley. The young king was now appealed to, on the ground of his religious feeling, to alter the succession so as to exclude not only his Catholic sister Mary but his lukewarm sister Elizabeth in favor of the strongly Protestant Lady Jane. Though his lawyers told him he could not alter the succession to the crown, he intimidated them into drawing up a "devise" purporting to do this.

[1] See A. L. Lowell: Public Opinion and Popular Government, 1914.